Our cultural, historic, and scientific heritage is increasingly being produced and shared in digital forms, which raises questions about the role of research libraries and archives in digital preservation. The purpose of this report is to share some common themes and provide an opportunity for broader community involvement. Interviews were conducted to identify opportunities and needs and focuses on gaps and challenges, in order to explore how we can strengthen collaborations. "Digital preservation involves the management and maintenance of digital objects to ensure the authenticity, accuracy, and functionality of content over time in the face of technological and administrative changes." A critical issue expressed: “The main risk is that one assumes that ‘somebody else’ will take care of the digital information.”
The following questions framed the discussions:
- What seems to be working well now (in which areas have we seen significant progress)?
- What are your thoughts on how the preservation community is preparing for new content types and formats?
- Do you have any observations about new research workflows and practices and their potential impact on the future of the scholarly record?
- What do you see as gaps or areas that need further attention?
- If you were writing a new preservation research or implementation grant, what would you focus on?
- The digital preservation community is getting larger, representing deeper expertise around a wide range of digital content types.
- Through several digital preservation and repository conferences and organizations, there is a robust exchange of best practices, standards, and preservation technique.
- There is now significant experience in implementing preservation strategies such as normalization, refreshing, migration, and emulation as the community of practitioners successfully moved these techniques from theory to practice.
- The development and adoption of shared standards, (such as OAIS, PREMIS, PRONOM) have helped the access, discovery, management, and preservation of digital resources.
- There are now a range of digital repository architectures and open source collaborations to provide open and scalable technical infrastructures for libraries and archives.
Challenges in Need of Further Research and Action:
Organizations and Leadership
- The role of research libraries is unclear as academic libraries are no longer perceived as critical drivers and leaders of digital preservation.
- how to provide sufficient levels of digital preservation to meet the community’s needs.
- the role of research libraries in digital preservation needs to be redefined
- It is difficult to preserve content that is not “owned” or “controlled” by libraries.
- library leaders have “shifted their attention from seeing preservation as a moral imperative to catering to the university’s immediate needs.”
- "Several wondered what arguments could convince provosts and other senior university leaders to invest in digital preservation."
- with the increasing influence of commercial and industrial actors, “the digital preservation community is becoming more diverse and the distinctive requirements of research libraries are not as dominant as they perhaps once were in the community.”
- “Expertise is increasingly fragmented as web archiving, digital curation, research data, repositories, and special collections are often placed in different library units without a common preservation mandate.”
- there seems to be some disconnect between how the top leadership level (University Librarians, Associate University Librarian) perceives preservation priorities and needs versus curators, digital collection specialists, archivists, and other specialists.
- it is important for specialists, such as curators and archivists, to have a grounded understanding of how their specific roles and priorities fit into the overall strategies of libraries and cultural heritage institutions.
- concern about how digital preservation activities are being slowed down or impeded due to politics and conflicts both within and outside of organizations.
Preservation Services and Program Areas
- There is confusion about the purpose and business models of preservation services, and in how such services fit together in a comprehensive preservation service framework
- understanding about what’s being preserved and the associated technical, organizational, and policy issues is important for effective planning and implementation of a digital preservation program.
- storage does not equate to preservation
- there is a need to better understand the current storage options and costs, especially cloud storage
- "we need to be careful about relying on the university IT unit for building storage" since they will focus more on providing platforms and less on providing commodity storage
- there are problems with legacy content that have not yet been resolved, including ejournals, ebooks, and Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)
- there is concern about the long-term sustainability and preservation of open access content, which is diverse and problematic
- there is a focus on initial identification, ingest, and description stages without a sufficient emphasis on how the archived content will be discovered, accessed, and used by scholars at the point of need in a usable and meaningful way
- initiatives tend to focus on initial identification, ingest, and description stages without a sufficient emphasis on how the archived content will be discovered, accessed, and used
- "It is difficult to justify collecting and preserving things if they aren’t providing value to your stakeholders.”
- There are questions about certification and self-audit so that we have a systematic and recurrent way of assessing progress and gaps
- there do not seem to be sufficient collaborative approaches to explore what constitutes success and how we identify and measure outcomes associated with digital preservation.
- “More candid discussions around loss and failure will promote openness and transparency in our community and help us with risk management."
Three overarching issues that may be fruitful to explore are:
- A roadmap to guide the international community in understanding what digital preservation comprises, defining the key problems, identifying barriers limitations, and developing an action agenda accordingly.
- Understanding the ownership, control, discovery and access of materials
- What are the measurable benefits of digital preservation that can be presented as a communal responsibility that deserves funding?
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