Digital Preservation - Challenges of Digital Preservation

Challenges of Digital Preservation

Society's heritage has been presented on many different materials, including stone, vellum, bamboo, silk, and paper. Now a large quantity of information exists in digital forms, including emails, blogs, social networking websites, national elections websites, web photo albums, and sites which change their content over time. With digital media it is easier to create content and keep it up-to-date, but at the same time there are many challenges in the preservation of this content, both technical and economic.

Unlike traditional analog objects such as books or photographs where the user has unmediated access to the content, a digital object always needs a software environment to render it. These environments keep evolving and changing at a rapid pace, threatening the continuity of access to the content. Physical storage media, data formats, hardware, and software all become obsolete over time, posing significant threats to the survival of the content. This process can be referred to as digital obsolescence.

In the case of born-digital content (e.g., institutional archives, Web sites, electronic audio and video content, born-digital photography and art, research data sets, observational data), the enormous and growing quantity of content presents significant scaling issues to digital preservation efforts.

Digital content can also present challenges to preservation because of its complex and dynamic nature, e.g., interactive Web pages, virtual reality and gaming environments, learning objects, social media sites.

The economic challenges of digital preservation are also great. Preservation programs require significant up front investment to create, along with ongoing costs for data ingest, data management, data storage, and staffing. One of the key strategic challenges to such programs is the fact that, while they require significant current and ongoing funding, their benefits accrue largely to future generations.