Exploring

What is Preservation?

Preservation and New Technologies

Preservation in cultural institutions over the past 30 to 40 years has been seen as fairly straightforward, involving specific activities such as environmental control, proper storage, disaster planning, reformatting, and conservation treatment. The increasing presence, however, of digital imaging and digital resources within cultural institutions in recent years has changed the way institutions perceive preservation. Digitization increases the complexity of the relationship between the medium (the physical artifact) and the message (the information contained therein).

Digital preservation must be considered in two contexts:

• Can digital scanning be used to preserve the content of existing collections, and if so, does that mean traditional preservation activities are not needed?
• How should collections that are originally created digitally (known as "born-digital") be preserved? What does it mean to preserve a digital object that can be easily changed without leaving any trace that the change was made?

Collection managers face difficult questions about technology's role in preserving collections. When is it sufficient to preserve just the information in an object, and when is it necessary to preserve the object itself? Is digital scanning of collections solely an access tool and a means of protecting collections from handling, or can it be considered a preservation strategy? Is digital scanning actually an effective means of protecting collections from handling, keeping in mind that the scanning process may involve much more handling of the collection than occasional use would? How does digital preservation fit into a traditional preservation program?

These issues are addressed in more detail in Session 6: Reformatting and Treatment, but it is crucial to understand that digital technology does not make traditional preservation unnecessary. Because of the difficulties inherent in preserving digital objects over the long term, digitization of collections is not a substitute for environmental control, proper storage, and other types of reformatting; it is simply another option in the preservation tool box. New technology does, however, make it even more difficult to allocate already-scarce resources among preservation activities.

See Michèle Cloonan's article, "W(h)ither Preservation?" (referenced in Additional Resourcesfor a discussion of the influences of new technologies on preservation. See also Abby Smith's Why Digitize? for a discussion of digitization's impact on traditional library roles.