Digital obsolescence: Material "at risk from the moment it's created".
by Megan McLeod
There are so many advantages to digitizing special collections, the most important of which are making materials more accessible to potential users while protecting the original artifacts from the wear and tear of being used directly.
However, one problem is always looming on the preservation horizon: Digital obsolescence.
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| I'm old enough that all my back ups used to be stored on these, which now make good coasters |
Digital obsolescence is when digital material becomes unusable because the file format and/or technology (software or hardware) needed to read the file are no longer available.
So, some things to consider when digitizing: Is a specialized piece of equipment going to be required to access it later? If images/files are being stored on a hard drive, will that hard drive still be usable when a theoretical Windows 15 comes out? Even if it's 'in the cloud', is a jpeg going to be useful in 2075?
As the British Library says, "digital collection content is at risk from the moment it's created’"
In the early 2000s, I worked as an administrator for a (now-defunct) non-profit organization that funded projects to restore, preserve, and redistribute ‘classic’ audiovisual materials, and, because of all the specialist archivists in the AV Trust's membership, they understood the dangers of relying on completely on digital formats even then; one of their grant stipulations was that a physical copy had to be created of any restoration project.
That didn’t just mean, for example, making a DVD of a film (which is in compressed, arguably incomplete format anyway, and a format with an unknown 'shelf life'), but an actual physical copy on film stock, which would then be put in an appropriate repository for long-term storage. Film lasts hundreds of years in the right conditions, but digital files will not; they will need to be upgraded, reformatted, or even replaced as technologies change.
That having been said, the library and archive community are making great strides to mitigate complications later. Institutions have their own guidelines as to what file formats are going to last longest. For example, here are what York University and The National Archives (which hasn’t been updated their guidelines since 2004, speaking of obsolescence!) recommend, which echo what other institutions are using, too: lots of TIFFs, jpegs, and PDFs.
As well, organizations like the UK-based Digital Preservation Coalition are bringing together the archival community to tackle their digital preservation questions and concerns, to help determine best practice, and to data-share on long-term strategies. They even have a Digital Preservation Handbook on their website...which points out that TIFF is a proprietary format that might not be supported in even the nearish future! Yikes. Yet another complication!
What this all means is that there is still a lot to learn and do, but that we do know that digitization special collections is unlikely to be one-time project; upgrading files, re-scanning, and possibly creating physical (but digital) copies are all part of the ongoing, complicated, long-term process to outrun digital obsolescence.
Sources:
British Library. (n.d.) Digital preservation. https://www.bl.uk/digital-preservation
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