Digital Preservation: An Overview*

Abstract

Digital preservation is not a new concept for libraries. The libraries have been migrating and refreshing their OPAC records as well as their databases developed in-house ever since automation in libraries started in mid 1980s. With availability of products and services in digital forms, libraries are committing larger portions of their budgetary allocation for either procuring or accessing digital contents. Preservation and archiving of digital contents has become a serious concern of libraries for collection either acquired through subscription, purchased in digital media or converted in-house. The article deliberates upon need, relevance and major challenges of digital preservation. It enumerates on dimensions and manifestation of digital preservation and describes traditional preservation tenets as applicable to the digital preservation. The article describes various digital preservation strategies with a caution that appropriate strategies may be adopted depending upon data types, situations, or institutions. The article touches upon digital preservation metadata as a subset of metadata that describes attributes of digital resources essential for its long-term accessibility and describes OAIS Reference Model as well as other major preservation metadata initiatives taken up by the OCLC and ARL. Considering the fact that short life of storage media, is one of the major crucial threat to digital preservation, the article briefly describes storage management as applicable to digital preservation repositories. Lastly, the article touches upon microfilming and digitization as hybrid solution for reliable

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