Feature


For keeps: finest preserve


Here are three slices of the digital preservation pie. Doing nothing is not an option


Keeping up with digital preservation Deciding to do nothing about preservation could be a disaster, says Paul Stokes


Introducing digital preservation to an organisation is not a task for the faint- hearted. There’s data to be found, people to


convince, policies to be written… and that’s before a single system has been procured or a single byte preserved. However, there is no time like the present and this is the ideal time to make a start. Delaying is not really an option because of the alarming hike in the amount of data that is being created. According to the World Economic Forum, an astonishing 90 per cent of the world’s data has been generated in the last two years alone. It says that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced by humans every day and 463 exabytes of data will be generated each day by humans by 2025 – that’s the equivalent of 212,765,957 DVDs per day!


Sometimes a backup is not enough Failure to preserve data properly can pose a significant reputational risk and could result in the loss of unique and irretrievable knowledge, as the server crash in 2016 at the Memorial University in Canada shows. In July that year, staff at the Queen Elizabeth II library at the university were


10 Research Information February/March 2021


undertaking routine maintenance that required power to the building to be cut and switched to a backup system, which failed. The backup to the backup (big batteries) came online and lasted about 40 minutes, which wasn’t long enough. More than 70 terabytes of data was lost. Luckily, physical documents and objects


still existed – but it all had to be digitised again.


Rescuing the bronze age in York Failing to adapt to rapid change of systems and technology is another risk to consider when preserving data – something that York University understands only too well. It’s often put about (in archaeological


circles at least) that archaeologists destroy their primary evidence as they discover and catalogue it. There’s no going back for a second bite of the cherry. After archaeologists had finished work on almost 180 sites in north-east London, all that remained were the archives stored in vaults of local museums. Those archives included data from many unpublished excavations, with very impressive Bronze Age material discovered on the banks of the River Thames.


“Luckily, physical documents and objects still existed – but it all had to be digitised again”


But when the project finished, the


archaeologists discovered, to their horror, that their irreplaceable data was running on obsolete technology using outmoded software and file formats. Some of their magnetic media was also corrupted. Luckily, a team of specialists managed to retrieve most of it. Getting started with preservation can be a daunting thing but to ensure access to digital materials is maintained in the long run, it’s important to ensure all systems are equipped to keep up with technology and organisational change. One means of automatically keeping


systems aligned and ‘speaking to each other’ is to use clever tools, such as Jisc’s Preservation. This tool automatically reformats files, so they are readable with new and yet-to-be-invented software. Once in the Preservation system, the


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