A Manager's Guide to the Long-Term Preservation of Electronic Documents

One of the key issues that 21st century information strategy wrestles with is digital preservation. Just look at how seriously the British Library is taking the issue.

We all know that information is being created at an unprecedented rate. But then what? Once that content is created, what happens to it?

Governments, organisation and individuals are all trying to find the balance between, on the one hand, tipping everything they create into some sort of digital landfill and, on the other, carefully archiving and preserving the lot on a just-in-case basis in case we or future generations need it.

Legislation and regulation naturally play their part in laying down requirements over content retention policies. But that is only part of the story.

Part of the problem of digital preservation is the bewildering number of formats in use in the digital age. If you want a cheap laugh you only have to dig out photographs of blokes (and it mostly was blokes) proudly handling unwieldy computer storage devices that were cutting edge a couple of decades ago.

The idea that these could be a long-term solution to record keeping seems about as sensible as the fashion and the haircuts portrayed in the photographs. But how do we know we are not making the same mistakes?

This manager’s guide does not aim to deal with the strategy of digital preservation in depth and so is not aimed at the information professional who may require substantial help on the issue. But it fulfils a useful function by reminding information professionals of the main issues, and provides ideas for drawing up digital preservation procedures that organisations could implement.

Perhaps more importantly it can help information professionals draw attention to the issue to colleagues, especially to senior managers.

The two authors – who judging from their biographies should be able to remember office life before a PC was on every desk – have adopted a clear writing style and make sensible definitions and distinctions.

For instance, they distinguish between digital backup and preservation. The former helps to recover ‘lost’ information from a computer system while the latter aims at long-term retention.

Which leads to another problem: how long are we trying to preserve digital records for? But rather than thinking in terms of time the authors suggest it is more helpful to think in terms of technical format so that information is not lost because of technological inaccessibility.

After setting out the digital preservation problem, this slim volume moves on to discuss retention periods, standards-based archival formats, storage media (paper and microfilm are still considered worthy of mention), metadata, archive creation and maintenance, and finally – and because this is a BSI publication – a review of related standards.

A number of BSI and ISO publications already exist on preservation of electronic records and as this field is expanding so rapidly, additional information is published on a regular basis. It is an interesting area and one where information professionals should be taking the lead. This book should provide a solid basis for action.

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