Digital Preservation

Digital Preservation is an intersting idea.  There are great advanatages to digital formats, the largest being access.  Wikipedia's article on Digital Preservation talks about the diferent strategies and types of digital preservation.  The most important ideas, I believe, are those regarding Migration of data.  For instance let's say I wanted to play the original Duke Nukem, which ran in MS-DOS.  This game is on 3 1/2" Floppy Drives which are not even read by my computer.  Digital preservation can come to the rescue.  The migration of this data would mean finding a computer which still read the disks, then moving the disks to files that today's computers understand.  Once this is complete the files can be read and played again.

A screen shot of Duke Nukem from the Duke Nukem Wikipedia article.

  The migration of digital files has far more implications than video games, although McDonough believes that video games have become an essential part of our culture and should be preserved as such.  However migration and digital preservation in general is incredibly important with born digital files such as emails.  In the article "'Digital Dark Age' May Doom Some Data" the perils of proprietary formats are raised.  Let's say that you wrote the charter for a new non-profit corporation in Word Perfect file format in the 1990s.  Now it's been some time and you want to re-visit your charter.  The problem lies that you don't have the machine to read the file format.  This is similar to the Duke Nukem problem, except hat a solution is offered.  If users create enough demand to do away with proprietary formats, such as .doc, .docx for our files, then it no longer matters which computer we have the files would be ubiquitous and playable.  A great example of this in practice is the .mp3 format, which is a non-propietary format and plays in any modern device such as iPhones, Android devices and Microsoft devices.

Looking at the Polar Bear Expedition from the University of Michigan Libraries we see an early example of digital preservation.  The Polar Bear Expedition ran into some learning bumps along the way.  I believe the project was too ambitious in its expectations.  The project uses link paths, which watch what you and other researchers' patterns of use to suggest materials which may be of interest.  This is similar to the way that Amazon.com suggests things to you.  The main difference here is usage, Amazon.com has ridiculously more users than that Polar Bear Expedition.  More users creates stronger suggestions which makes the process work.  Also the Polar Bear Expedition had a comments section.  Comments only help users if they are used.  The lack of comments on this website has unfortunately made this feature rather irrelevant.  The Polar Bear Expedition was an ambitious project in 2006, unfortunately it did not derive the number of users necessary for the project to prosper from all of their rather innovative ideas (for 2006).

In closing digital preservation is a interesting field with many challenges.  The field is still in its infancy and I believe will continue to grow.  In 2009 the New York Times wrote this article highlighting the field and their ideas for growth in the future.  The Digital Preservation Europe website said it well when they explained the fragility of digital works:

"Digital objects are fragile because they require various layers of technological mediation before they can be heard, seen or understood by people. Digital objects are also much more venerable to physical damage. One scratch on CD-ROM containing 100 e-books can make the content inaccessible, whereas to damage 100 hard copy books by one scratching move is - fortunately - impossible."

The same article defined Digital Preservation the best that I found, they said that "Digital Preservation is a set of activities required to make sure digital objects can be located, rendered used, and understood in the future."