Fact-checked by Grok 2 weeks ago

Digital preservation

Digital preservation refers to the series of managed activities and processes designed to ensure that digital materials remain accessible, understandable, and usable over the long term, despite challenges such as technological obsolescence, media degradation, hardware and software failures, and organizational changes.^[1]^[2] This field encompasses the safeguarding of a wide range of content, including cultural heritage items, scientific data, government records, and personal digital assets, to prevent loss and maintain their integrity for future generations.^[3]^[4] The importance of digital preservation has grown with the exponential increase in digital content creation, particularly since the late 20th century, as institutions like libraries, archives, and museums recognize the risks of digital materials becoming inaccessible without proactive intervention.^[5] Key initiatives, such as the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), established in 2000, have focused on developing tools, standards, and partnerships to preserve at-risk digital content across the United States.^[5] Internationally, UNESCO's PERSIST project promotes global cooperation to address the rapid evolution of information technologies and ensure the long-term availability of digital heritage.^[3] Core strategies in digital preservation include migration—converting files to updated formats to avoid obsolescence—emulation, which recreates original software environments on new hardware, and the creation of comprehensive preservation metadata to document content provenance, authenticity, and technical characteristics.^[4] Many organizations rely on trusted digital repositories compliant with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model, which outlines standardized processes for ingest, storage, access, and administration of digital objects.^[4] Additionally, maintaining multiple copies across diverse storage media, regular integrity checks, and risk assessments form essential practices to mitigate threats.^[1] Despite these approaches, digital preservation faces significant challenges, including the rapid pace of technological change leading to proprietary or obsolete file formats, high costs associated with ongoing storage and migration, and the need for sustained organizational commitment and skilled personnel.^[6] For instance, formats like early word processors or specialized media files can become unreadable without intervention, while exponential data growth strains resources.^[6] Addressing these requires international standards, such as ISO 14721 for OAIS and ISO 16363 for repository audits, to foster interoperability and trustworthiness.^[4]

Introduction and Fundamentals

Definition and Scope

Digital preservation refers to the active management and protection of digital objects through a series of managed activities necessary to ensure their long-term accessibility, usability, and authenticity, regardless of changes in technology or user environments.^[7]^[8] This process goes beyond simple storage by addressing potential degradation, obsolescence, and loss to maintain the content's integrity and interpretability for future generations.^[2] The field emerged in the 1990s as libraries, archives, and cultural institutions grappled with the rapid growth of digital collections, spurred by the proliferation of the internet and digitization projects.^[9] Early efforts, such as the 1994 Task Force on Digital Archiving by the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group, highlighted the unique challenges of digital materials compared to traditional analog records.^[9] By the mid-1990s, the development of the first digital libraries underscored the need for systematic preservation practices amid increasing volumes of electronic content.^[10] The scope of digital preservation includes both born-digital content—originally created in digital formats, such as emails, databases, and web pages—and digitized materials converted from analog sources like photographs or manuscripts.^[11]^[12] Unlike backups, which primarily serve short-term disaster recovery and data redundancy, digital preservation emphasizes ongoing strategies to render content usable over decades or centuries, adapting to evolving hardware, software, and formats.^[13] It is vital for safeguarding cultural heritage by protecting irreplaceable records of human history and creativity, ensuring legal compliance with records retention laws such as SEC Rule 17a-4 that mandate long-term accessibility of financial and operational data, and preserving societal memory against the fragility of digital media.^[14]^[15]^[16] Without intervention, significant risks loom: A 2024 Pew Research Center study found that 25% of webpages existing between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, with 38% of pages from 2013 having vanished, due to link rot and site updates.^[17] As of 2025, the global volume of digital data is estimated at 181 zettabytes, driven by exponential growth in IoT devices, social media, and AI-generated content, intensifying the urgency for robust preservation to avert widespread loss.^[18]

Core Principles

Digital preservation relies on a set of core principles that guide the management and safeguarding of digital materials to ensure their long-term accessibility, usability, and reliability. These principles provide a foundational framework for institutions and organizations, emphasizing proactive strategies to mitigate risks associated with technological change and data degradation. Central to this approach is the recognition that digital objects are inherently fragile, requiring systematic evaluation, documentation, and maintenance from the outset of their lifecycle. The principle of appraisal involves evaluating and selecting digital materials for long-term preservation based on their content, contextual significance, and anticipated future use. This process helps prioritize resources by assessing the intellectual, cultural, or evidential value of digital assets, ensuring that only those deemed essential are committed to preservation efforts. For instance, appraisal considers factors such as uniqueness, legal status, and potential research utility to avoid overwhelming storage and management capacities.^[19] Identification of digital objects is achieved through unique identifiers and standardized descriptive metadata. Unique identifiers, such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) or Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs), provide persistent and unambiguous references to digital materials, facilitating their location and retrieval over time. Complementing these, standards like Dublin Core offer a simple yet effective schema for describing key attributes, including title, creator, and format, which supports discovery and management in preservation systems.^[20]^[21] Integrity ensures that digital objects remain unaltered and complete throughout their lifecycle, primarily through fixity checks using cryptographic checksums. Algorithms such as MD5 or SHA-256 generate unique hash values for files, allowing verification that no changes—intentional or accidental—have occurred since the last check. These checks are routinely performed during ingestion, storage, and access to detect corruption or tampering, with SHA-256 preferred for its higher resistance to collisions compared to MD5.^[22] Characterization involves analyzing file formats and structures to understand their technical properties and potential preservation risks. Tools like JHOVE (version 1.34 as of July 2025) perform identification, validation, and extraction of metadata for various formats, while PRONOM, maintained by The National Archives, serves as a registry of file signatures and formats to enable accurate recognition. This principle aids in planning migrations or normalizations by revealing dependencies on proprietary software or obsolete encodings.^[23] Sustainability focuses on maintaining the renderability and significant properties of digital objects to preserve their essential functionality and appearance. Renderability ensures that content can be displayed or interpreted using available software, often requiring updates to emulation or migration strategies. Significant properties, such as resolution, color depth, or layout in documents, represent the core attributes that must be retained to uphold the object's original intent and quality, guiding preservation decisions to avoid loss of meaning.^[24]^[25] Authenticity is preserved by tracking provenance—the documented history of an object's creation, custody, and changes—and employing digital signatures. Provenance records establish a chain of custody, demonstrating that the object has not been illicitly modified, while digital signatures use public-key cryptography to verify the creator's identity and ensure non-repudiation. These mechanisms collectively provide evidence of trustworthiness, essential for legal and scholarly validation.^[26]^[27] Access principles balance openness with security to promote widespread use while protecting sensitive or restricted materials. Open access facilitates discovery and reuse through standardized interfaces, but it must incorporate rights management to enforce intellectual property controls, such as licensing agreements or access restrictions. Security measures, including encryption and authentication protocols, safeguard against unauthorized alterations, ensuring that preserved content remains available to authorized users without compromising integrity.^[28]^[29]

Key Concepts

Appraisal and Selection

Appraisal and selection in digital preservation involve systematically evaluating digital materials to determine which should be retained for long-term access, balancing resource constraints with cultural, historical, and informational value. This process is essential due to the exponential growth of digital content, where not all data warrants preservation efforts. Unlike traditional analog appraisal, digital appraisal must account for the born-digital nature of records, their reproducibility, and the technical dependencies that affect usability over time.^[30] Key methods for appraisal include functional, content-based, and use-based approaches. Functional appraisal, often termed macro-appraisal, evaluates materials based on the creator's organizational functions and business needs, prioritizing records that document core activities or decision-making processes, as practiced by institutions like Library and Archives Canada. Content-based appraisal, or micro-appraisal, assesses the intrinsic qualities of individual items, such as their informational depth or rarity, guided by frameworks like UNESCO's guidelines for selecting heritage content. Use-based appraisal focuses on anticipated future access and researcher needs, considering factors like data reusability, as emphasized in policies from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). These methods can be complemented by statistical sampling for representative selection or risk analysis to identify high-vulnerability items.^[30]^[30]^[30]^[30] Selection criteria emphasize uniqueness, evidential value, and redundancy assessment to prevent over-preservation. Uniqueness prioritizes irreplaceable content that fills gaps in collections or represents singular cultural artifacts, as outlined in guidelines from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC). Evidential value targets materials that substantiate legal rights, administrative actions, or historical events, a core principle in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) policy, which requires records to document citizens' rights or federal officials' actions. Redundancy evaluation avoids duplicative holdings by weighing duplication against preservation costs and institutional mission, helping to streamline collections as recommended in iPRES conference frameworks. These criteria ensure decisions align with broader archival mandates while managing storage demands.^[30]^[31]^[32] Tools supporting appraisal include standardized checklists and cost-benefit models. NARA's appraisal guidelines provide a structured framework with checklists for assessing archival value, including factors like completeness and metadata availability for digital records. Similarly, the DCC's "How to Appraise and Select Data for Curation" offers practical checklists covering legal status, technical feasibility, and content quality. Cost-benefit analysis models, such as those integrating preservation risks with resource allocation, aid in quantifying decisions, particularly for large-scale evaluations. These tools facilitate consistent, defensible selections across institutions.^[31]^[30]^[33] Challenges arise from the massive scale of digital collections, often spanning petabytes, necessitating techniques like sampling or AI-assisted triage. Appraising vast volumes manually is impractical, leading to methods such as random or systematic sampling to infer collection value, as employed by the National Library of France for web archives. By 2025, advancements in machine learning enable automated triage, with AI models trained on archival datasets to prioritize historically significant born-digital records, as demonstrated in UK government initiatives using AI for sensitivity review and selection. These tools reduce human effort but require validation to mitigate biases in algorithmic decisions.^[30]^[34] Legal aspects, particularly copyright and privacy, profoundly influence selection decisions. Copyright law permits limited preservation copies under Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act for unpublished works, but restricts public access and derivative uses, complicating appraisal of third-party content. Privacy considerations, governed by regulations like GDPR in Europe, mandate excluding or redacting personal data during selection to avoid breaches, requiring early assessment of sensitive information in records. Institutions must secure rights clearances via depositor agreements to ensure selected materials can be legally preserved and accessed.^[35]^[36]^[33]

Metadata Management

In digital preservation, metadata plays a crucial role in identifying, contextualizing, and managing digital objects over time. Preservation metadata encompasses several types, each serving distinct functions to ensure long-term accessibility and usability. Descriptive metadata provides information about the content and context of the object, such as its title, creator, subject, and date of creation, facilitating discovery and retrieval. Technical metadata details the object's physical and logical characteristics, including file format, compression method, hardware specifications used for creation, and software dependencies, which are essential for rendering and migration decisions. Administrative metadata covers management aspects, such as rights management, provenance (the history of custody and changes), and access restrictions, supporting legal and operational oversight. Structural metadata describes the relationships between digital components, such as how files within a collection are organized or linked, enabling the reconstruction of complex objects like multi-page documents or multimedia assemblies.^[37]^[38]^[39] Standardized schemas are vital for consistent creation and exchange of preservation metadata. The PREMIS (Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies) Data Dictionary serves as the international de facto standard for core preservation metadata, defining entities, properties, and relationships across semantic units like objects, agents, rights, and events to support preservation actions such as ingest, validation, and fixity checks. For technical metadata specific to images, the MIX (Metadata for Images in XML) schema provides a structured format based on the NISO Z39.87 Data Dictionary, capturing details like pixel dimensions, color space, and scanning parameters to aid in the long-term management of digital still images. These standards promote interoperability by allowing metadata from diverse systems to be integrated into preservation repositories.^[40]^[41] Metadata can be attached to digital objects through embedded or external methods, each with implications for preservation. Embedded metadata is stored directly within the file, such as EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) data in JPEG images, which includes camera settings and timestamps, ensuring the information travels with the object during transfers but may be limited by file format constraints or vulnerability to editing. External metadata, conversely, is maintained separately in sidecar files (e.g., XML companions) or relational databases, offering flexibility for complex schemas like PREMIS but requiring additional mechanisms to link it reliably to the object, such as unique identifiers. In preservation workflows, a hybrid approach is often recommended to balance portability and extensibility.^[42]^[37] Tools and frameworks facilitate the automated generation, validation, and maintenance of preservation metadata. The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) acts as a container schema in XML for packaging descriptive, administrative, structural, and technical metadata, commonly used in digital repositories to generate submission information packages (SIPs) and archival information packages (AIPs) while validating compliance through schema checks. Recent advancements, such as the METS 2 Schema released in March 2025, simplify this process for broader adoption in preservation systems. Emerging integrations, including blockchain for creating tamper-evident logs of metadata changes, enhance provenance tracking by providing immutable records of events like migrations or access, though implementation remains experimental in standards like PREMIS extensions.^[43]^[44]^[45] Best practices for metadata sustainability emphasize normalization and interoperability to mitigate obsolescence risks. Normalization involves standardizing metadata values (e.g., using controlled vocabularies for formats like MIME types) during ingest to ensure consistency across systems, while interoperability is achieved by adhering to extensible schemas that support future enhancements without breaking existing structures. Regular audits and automated validation workflows, guided by standards like PREMIS, help maintain metadata integrity over time, with metadata itself often used briefly in integrity verification processes to confirm object authenticity. Institutions are advised to document metadata creation policies and invest in tools that automate updates during format migrations, ensuring sustained usability in evolving technological environments.^[46]^[47]^[48]

Integrity and Authenticity

Integrity in digital preservation refers to the assurance that digital objects remain unaltered from their original state, protecting against both accidental corruption and intentional tampering. Fixity, a core mechanism for maintaining integrity, verifies that a file's bits have not changed over time. This is achieved through checksums generated by hashing algorithms, such as SHA-256, which produce a unique fixed-length value—essentially a digital fingerprint—from the file's byte content. The calculation involves applying the SHA-256 function to the entire file: for a given file, the hash is computed as SHA-256(file bytes), resulting in a 256-bit (64-character hexadecimal) digest that is highly sensitive to even minor alterations.^[49]^[50] Periodic comparisons of newly computed checksums against stored reference values detect discrepancies, enabling timely interventions like restoration from redundant copies. Such checks are typically scheduled based on storage media risks, such as every six months for disk-based systems, to ensure long-term bit-level stability.^[51] Authenticity complements integrity by confirming that digital objects are genuine representations of their intended originals, including verifiable provenance and origin. Digital signatures, implemented via Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), provide a cryptographic method to prove authorship and detect modifications. In this process, a content creator signs the object using their private key to generate a signature, which recipients verify against the public key to confirm the signer's identity and the object's unaltered state—often employing algorithms like RSA for key generation and signing. PKI frameworks manage key distribution, revocation, and trust hierarchies to link signatures to real-world entities, ensuring long-term verifiability even as keys expire.^[52]^[53] Audit trails and chain of custody documentation further bolster authenticity by maintaining chronological records of an object's handling, transfers, and transformations, creating a verifiable lineage from creation to access. These records detail agents involved, timestamps, and actions taken, preventing disputes over provenance in preservation contexts.^[49] Automated detection mechanisms in digital repositories enhance proactive integrity and authenticity monitoring. Repository systems routinely perform fixity checks during ingest, storage, and dissemination, flagging mismatches in checksums or signatures that indicate corruption or tampering. For instance, tools integrated into platforms like those compliant with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model run scheduled validations across collections, alerting administrators to anomalies and triggering audits. These processes rely on embedded scripts or services that compare hashes and signatures without manual intervention, scaling to handle vast datasets while minimizing human error.^[49]^[51] Technical metadata plays a pivotal role in tracking changes and supporting verification throughout an object's lifecycle. Standards like PREMIS (Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies) define structured elements for recording events—such as ingest, validation, or migration—that affect integrity, including outcomes like successful checksum verification or signature confirmation. PREMIS events capture details such as event type, date, agent, and linking identifiers, forming an auditable history that doubles as chain of custody evidence. Technical metadata within PREMIS also documents object properties, like format identifiers and size, allowing comparisons over time to detect unintended alterations. This metadata is typically encoded in XML for interoperability across repositories.^[40] Emerging methods leveraging artificial intelligence for anomaly detection, particularly in identifying subtle alterations in large-scale datasets that traditional checksums might overlook. AI algorithms analyze patterns in file structures, metadata streams, or access logs to flag deviations indicative of degradation or tampering, such as pixel inconsistencies in images or semantic shifts in text corpora. For example, machine learning models trained on historical preservation data can predict and detect "digital decay" by monitoring integrity metrics in real-time, integrating with repository workflows for automated alerts. These approaches, discussed in recent international forums, enhance scalability for born-digital collections while preserving computational efficiency.^[54]

Theoretical Foundations

Historical Milestones

The field of digital preservation emerged in the mid-1990s as concerns grew over the longevity of digital materials in an increasingly networked world. A pivotal publication, "Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information," was issued in May 1996 by the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group (RLG). This report highlighted the fragility of digital objects due to technological dependencies and proposed foundational strategies that inspired systems like LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), a peer-to-peer network designed to ensure redundant, distributed storage for long-term access, developed in 1999 at Stanford University. Concurrently, the Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine in 1996, beginning systematic web crawling to capture snapshots of the evolving internet, with archiving efforts scaling significantly in the early 2000s as web content proliferated. In 2001, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) was established in the United Kingdom to coordinate efforts among libraries, archives, and other institutions, initially focusing on national challenges but expanding its membership to include international organizations by the early 2010s, reaching over 40 members globally by 2012. Building on this momentum, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) was launched in March 2004 in the UK with funding from Jisc and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, aiming to advance research, training, and best practices in managing digital data throughout its lifecycle.^[55] The 2010s saw further institutionalization of digital preservation practices. The DPC's global outreach intensified, exemplified by its biennial International Digital Preservation Awards starting in 2010, which recognized innovations like the Memento Project for aggregating web archives.^[56] In 2015, UNESCO adopted the "Recommendation concerning the preservation of, and access to, documentary heritage including in digital form," urging member states to integrate digital heritage into national policies and foster international cooperation to safeguard born-digital and digitized content against obsolescence. From 2020 to 2025, European Union-funded initiatives addressed emerging complexities, such as the data explosion from Internet of Things (IoT) devices and social media platforms, through AI-assisted preservation. The ReInHerit project (2021–2024), supported by Horizon 2020, developed AI-driven tools for 3D modeling and semantic annotation to enhance the preservation and accessibility of cultural heritage data, tackling scalability issues in vast digital collections.^[57] These efforts underscored a shift toward automated, intelligent systems to manage the growing volume and variety of digital assets.

Influential Models and Frameworks

One of the most foundational frameworks in digital preservation is the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model, standardized as ISO 14721:2012 and updated to ISO 14721:2025.^[58] This model outlines a conceptual architecture for archiving digital information, emphasizing long-term accessibility and usability by defining six core functional entities: ingestion, which handles the receipt and validation of submitted content; archival storage, responsible for secure long-term retention; data management, which oversees metadata and content organization; administration, managing overall operations; preservation planning, monitoring technological changes and strategies; and access, facilitating user retrieval and dissemination. Central to OAIS are the information package types—Submission Information Packages (SIPs) for incoming data, Archival Information Packages (AIPs) for internal storage with preservation metadata, and Dissemination Information Packages (DIPs) for delivery to users—which ensure content integrity throughout its lifecycle. Building on OAIS principles, the Trusted Digital Repository (TDR) Model, developed collaboratively by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in 2002, provides criteria for evaluating repository reliability.^[59] It identifies key attributes including organizational viability, which assesses governance and commitment to preservation; financial sustainability to ensure ongoing funding; technological and procedural suitability for effective operations; system security to protect against threats; and procedural accountability through transparent policies and audits.^[59] These attributes guide institutions in establishing repositories that maintain public trust in preserved digital assets over time.^[59] The InterPARES (International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems) projects, initiated in 1999 and continuing through multiple phases, address the authenticity of digital records in archival contexts. Focusing on records no longer actively used by creators, InterPARES emphasizes diplomatic analysis to verify record reliability through provenance, chain of custody, and fixed-form elements.^[60] The projects offer guidelines for assessing and maintaining authenticity, including requirements for presuming reliability upon transfer to archives and producing authentic copies thereafter, such as embedding metadata for verifiable transformations.^[60] These frameworks support archival practices by integrating legal, procedural, and technical measures to counteract risks like alteration or obsolescence. In the mid-2000s, the iRODS (Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) project explored data grid architectures for distributed digital preservation, enabling scalable storage and access across networked systems.^[61] This approach leveraged grid technologies to manage large-scale data collections, facilitating replication, integrity checks, and federated management in environments like research data repositories.^[61] Another key framework is PREMIS (Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies), a data dictionary for preservation metadata developed by the Library of Congress, which provides standardized elements for documenting actions, rights, and technical aspects of digital objects.^[40] Recent advancements as of 2025 integrate these models with cloud-native frameworks, such as those advanced by APTrust, which emphasize open infrastructure for elastic, distributed preservation.^[62] APTrust's updates incorporate BagIt packaging aligned with OAIS and TDR attributes, supporting dynamic scaling and recovery in cloud environments to enhance sustainability for scholarly and cultural records.^[63]

Challenges

Technological and Format Obsolescence

Technological and format obsolescence pose significant risks to the long-term accessibility of digital materials, as hardware, software, and file structures evolve rapidly, rendering stored data unreadable or unusable without intervention. Physical media degradation, often termed bit rot or data decay, affects storage mediums like magnetic tapes and optical discs such as CDs, where environmental factors and material instability lead to gradual corruption of binary data. For instance, magnetic tapes typically have a usable lifespan of 10-20 years under optimal conditions, after which magnetic domains weaken, causing bit errors that accumulate over time.^[64] Similarly, CDs and DVDs suffer from oxidation, delamination, or "disc rot," compromising data integrity without regular verification.^[65] Format obsolescence occurs when proprietary or outdated file structures become unsupported by contemporary software, isolating content from users. Early word processing formats like those from WordPerfect (versions 3.1 and earlier) exemplify this, as their binary encodings relied on specific, now-discontinued applications, making documents inaccessible without conversion tools developed post-obsolescence.^[66] A prominent case is Adobe Flash (SWF format), which reached end-of-life on December 31, 2020, with browsers blocking playback from January 2021; this proprietary multimedia format, once ubiquitous for web animations and interactive content, now requires emulation or migration for preservation, affecting over 185,000 files in collections like the Library of Congress.^[67] Renderability issues further exacerbate obsolescence by tying content access to specific hardware and software environments that become unavailable. Digital artifacts such as 1990s video games, dependent on proprietary consoles like the Sega Genesis or Sony PlayStation, often fail to render accurately on modern systems due to differences in processing, graphics rendering, and input methods, necessitating emulators to simulate original conditions.^[68] These challenges highlight the need for strategies that preserve not just the bits but the interactive experience, as incomplete emulation can alter significant properties like timing or visual fidelity.^[69] Obsolescence manifests across multiple layers of digital archiving, each vulnerable to distinct failure modes. At the bit-level (physical layer), raw binary data on media degrades independently of content meaning, requiring fixity checks to detect corruption.^[70] The logical layer involves file formats and software interpretations, where obsolescence arises from unsupported encodings or dependencies, potentially rendering data streams unparseable.^[70] At the semantic (conceptual) layer, the human-understandable meaning or functionality may be lost if rendering tools fail to convey essential characteristics, such as interactive behaviors in software or contextual nuances in documents.^[70] These layers, as outlined in foundational models like OAIS, underscore that comprehensive preservation must address all to maintain authenticity and usability. As of 2025, emerging technologies introduce novel obsolescence risks. The proliferation of AI-generated content, often in proprietary or ephemeral formats like those from generative models (e.g., Stable Diffusion outputs or custom neural network embeddings), challenges preservation due to rapid model evolution and lack of standardized encodings, potentially rendering vast archives of synthetic media inaccessible without ongoing AI infrastructure support.^[71] Concurrently, advances in quantum computing threaten encryption integral to digital preservation, as algorithms like Shor's can decrypt widely used standards (e.g., RSA) in polynomial time, exposing archived cultural heritage data to retroactive breaches unless migrated to post-quantum cryptography such as lattice-based schemes.^[72] These developments demand proactive monitoring to avert widespread loss.

Organizational and Sustainability Issues

Institutions responsible for digital preservation often face significant organizational challenges, including chronic underfunding, limited staff expertise, and inadequate policy frameworks. Many libraries, archives, and cultural heritage organizations struggle to secure sustained financial support for long-term preservation activities, as budgets are frequently prioritized for immediate access needs over future-proofing digital assets.^[73] This funding shortfall exacerbates the difficulty in hiring and retaining specialists skilled in evolving preservation technologies, leading to reliance on ad hoc solutions rather than systematic strategies.^[74] Furthermore, the absence of comprehensive institutional policies can result in inconsistent practices, increasing the risk of data loss and hindering collaboration across departments.^[75] Reports highlight that without dedicated organizational commitment, preservation efforts remain fragmented, underscoring the need for integrated frameworks to address these systemic gaps.^[14] Legal barriers further complicate digital preservation, particularly around intellectual property rights, jurisdictional conflicts over global data, and compliance with evolving regulations. Intellectual property laws pose challenges for archiving and copying digital materials, as exceptions for preservation in libraries and archives vary widely by country and often fail to accommodate born-digital content.^[76] For instance, copyright restrictions can limit the migration or emulation of files needed to prevent obsolescence, creating tensions between access rights and owner protections.^[35] Jurisdictional issues arise with data stored across borders, where conflicting laws on access and transfer complicate preservation efforts for international collections.^[77] Compliance with frameworks like the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of 2018 requires balancing preservation with data minimization and consent principles, while emerging 2025 data sovereignty acts, such as the EU Data Act applicable from September 2025, impose stricter rules on data portability and localization that affect global archiving.^[78]^[79] These regulations heighten risks for institutions handling multinational data, demanding robust legal strategies to ensure ongoing compliance.^[80] Sustainability concerns in digital preservation are intensified by the environmental demands of data storage infrastructure, including high energy consumption and vulnerability to climate change. Data centers, essential for preserving vast digital collections, are projected to consume between 650 and 1,050 terawatt-hours globally by 2026, representing approximately 2-3% of worldwide electricity use amid rising AI-driven demands.^[81] This growth contributes to a substantial carbon footprint, prompting mitigation strategies such as adopting renewable energy sources, optimizing cooling systems, and measuring emissions specific to preservation workflows.^[82] Climate change exacerbates these issues by increasing the frequency of extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods, which threaten data center operations through water scarcity for cooling and physical infrastructure damage.^[83] A 2021 survey indicated that 45% of U.S. data centers had already experienced such events, highlighting the urgency for resilient site selection and adaptive practices in preservation planning.^[84] Economic models for digital preservation reveal ongoing cost pressures, with projections emphasizing the need for scalable approaches to manage expenses over decades. Total costs, including storage, metadata management, and periodic integrity checks, are estimated at approximately $0.06 per gigabyte annually when amortized over 15 years, though this varies by content type and complexity—ranging from $0.01 for simple files to higher for multimedia.^[85] These figures underscore the economic burden on institutions, where upfront investments in infrastructure must be balanced against long-term operational sustainability.^[86] Emerging technologies like blockchain offer potential for decentralized sustainability by enabling distributed storage networks that reduce reliance on energy-intensive centralized data centers, enhancing data integrity through tamper-proof ledgers while promoting resource efficiency.^[87]

Strategies and Approaches

Technical Preservation Methods

Technical preservation methods encompass a range of strategies designed to counteract the physical degradation of storage media and the obsolescence of file formats and software environments, ensuring long-term access to digital objects.^[88] These approaches focus on proactive interventions rather than passive storage, prioritizing the maintenance of significant properties such as content, context, and functionality.^[70] Refreshing involves the periodic copying of digital data from one storage medium to another of the same type to mitigate physical decay, without altering the data itself.^[88] This method addresses media failure risks, such as bit rot on magnetic tapes or optical discs, by leveraging newer instances of compatible hardware to extend the lifespan of the original carrier.^[89] For instance, libraries routinely refresh data from aging hard drives to solid-state drives to prevent data loss due to hardware degradation.^[90] While straightforward and cost-effective for simple file transfers, refreshing requires regular monitoring to avoid cumulative errors during repeated copies.^[70] Migration transforms digital objects from outdated formats or media to contemporary equivalents, preserving essential characteristics like visual fidelity or semantic integrity.^[91] The process typically includes three stages: analysis to identify significant properties and risks, transformation using tools to convert files (e.g., from TIFF to JPEG2000 for image archiving), and validation to verify that the migrated version retains authenticity and usability.^[92] This technique counters format obsolescence by updating content to remain compatible with evolving software and hardware standards.^[70] Widely adopted in cultural heritage institutions, migration ensures that proprietary formats do not render collections inaccessible over time.^[93] Emulation recreates the original hardware and software environment in which a digital object was created, allowing it to run on modern systems without altering the object itself.^[94] By simulating legacy operating systems and processors, emulators enable the execution of obsolete software, such as running MS-DOS applications via DOSBox on contemporary computers.^[95] This approach is particularly effective for interactive or executable content, like early video games or database software, where migration might compromise behavioral authenticity.^[96] Emulation preserves the look, feel, and functionality of the original experience, though it demands significant computational resources and expertise to configure accurately.^[94] Encapsulation bundles a digital object with its associated metadata, dependencies, and descriptive information into a self-contained package to facilitate future handling and interpretation.^[97] This method enhances portability and context preservation, ensuring that files are not separated from essential details like provenance or rendering instructions.^[89] A prominent example is the Web ARChive (WARC) format, used for web archiving, which encapsulates harvested web pages, resources, and metadata into a single, standardized file for replay and analysis.^[89] Encapsulation supports long-term manageability by reducing dependency on external systems, though complex objects may require layered packaging to handle interdependencies.^[97] Replication creates multiple identical copies of digital objects and distributes them across geographically diverse locations to provide redundancy against localized failures.^[90] This strategy mitigates risks from hardware malfunctions, disasters, or cyberattacks by ensuring that data loss in one site does not affect overall availability.^[98] Institutions often employ three or more copies, with at least two in separate facilities, following principles like the 3-2-1 backup rule adapted for preservation.^[99] Replication is a foundational tactic, often combined with other methods, to achieve high durability rates exceeding 99.999999999% over extended periods.^[100] As of 2025, emerging techniques integrate artificial intelligence for automated migration, where AI algorithms monitor format risks, predict obsolescence, and execute conversions with minimal human intervention while validating outcomes against predefined criteria.^[101] Similarly, blockchain technology is being explored for version control in preservation workflows, providing immutable ledgers to track changes, ensure provenance, and enable decentralized verification of object integrity across distributed systems.^[87] These innovations enhance efficiency and trustworthiness, particularly for large-scale collections.^[44]

Repository and Storage Solutions

Digital preservation relies on various repository types tailored to different scales and purposes, including institutional, disciplinary, and national systems. Institutional repositories, operated by organizations such as universities or libraries, focus on archiving and disseminating an institution's scholarly and cultural outputs using open-source platforms like DSpace or Fedora Commons. These systems emphasize long-term access and interoperability through standards like OAI-PMH.^[102]^[103] Disciplinary repositories target domain-specific content, such as the Protein Data Bank (PDB), which stores and curates three-dimensional structures of proteins and nucleic acids to support biological research. National repositories, exemplified by the Library of Congress's National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), preserve large-scale historical collections like digitized newspapers, ensuring public access to national heritage materials. Persistent archives represent self-sustaining systems designed for indefinite data retention through automated planning and management. Pioneered in models from the San Diego Supercomputer Center in collaboration with NASA, these archives use rule-based data grids to handle migrations, audits, and authenticity checks without ongoing human intervention, enabling upgrades to hardware and software while preserving data provenance. The infrastructure integrates ingestion, storage, discovery, and dissemination components to support collection-based preservation over centuries.^[104]^[105] Cloud-based solutions provide scalable infrastructure for managing preserved digital collections, with advantages including virtually unlimited storage capacity and automated durability features. Amazon S3 Glacier, for instance, offers low-cost archival storage classes with 11 nines (99.999999999%) durability and retrieval options optimized for infrequent access, making it suitable for large-scale preservation efforts. However, these systems carry risks such as vendor lock-in, where proprietary formats or APIs hinder data portability to alternative providers, potentially increasing long-term costs and dependencies.^[106]^[107] Decentralized approaches address centralization vulnerabilities by distributing storage and verification across networks. The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) facilitates content-addressed, peer-to-peer storage, allowing preserved data to remain accessible even if individual nodes fail, as files are retrieved via cryptographic hashes rather than locations. Blockchain enhances integrity in these setups by creating tamper-evident chains of custody, ensuring that alterations to preserved artifacts are detectable and provenance is verifiable through distributed consensus mechanisms.^[108]^[87] Emerging in 2025, hybrid cloud-edge computing architectures combine edge devices for real-time, low-latency data acquisition and access with central cloud repositories for robust storage, improving efficiency in preservation workflows such as automated restoration of cultural artifacts. These systems integrate technical preservation methods like format migration directly into the architecture for seamless long-term management.^[109]

Assessment and Certification

Standards and Criteria

Standards and criteria for digital preservation repositories emphasize trustworthiness through structured audits and certifications that evaluate organizational, operational, and technical capabilities. These frameworks ensure long-term accessibility, integrity, and authenticity of digital assets by providing measurable benchmarks for compliance. International efforts have produced several key standards, each addressing different aspects of repository reliability and sustainability.^[110] The ISO 16363:2012 standard, titled Space data and information transfer systems—Audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories, establishes a comprehensive audit checklist for assessing digital repositories. It covers over 100 criteria across three main areas: organizational infrastructure (e.g., governance and legal frameworks), digital object management (e.g., ingest, preservation planning, and access), and infrastructure and security risk management (e.g., physical and technical safeguards). This evidence-based approach enables third-party audits to verify a repository's adherence to the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model, promoting global interoperability and confidence in preservation practices.^[111]^[110] Building on earlier work, the Trusted Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC) framework, developed by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in 2007, provides metrics for evaluating transparency, responsibility, and auditability in digital repositories. TRAC outlines 84 specific attributes and responsibilities, grouped into organizational, digital object, and technology dimensions, serving as a foundational checklist for self-assessment and external review. It emphasizes the need for repositories to demonstrate ongoing commitment to preservation through documented policies, risk management, and measurable outcomes, influencing subsequent international standards.^[59] The European Framework for Audit and Certification of Digital Repositories, initiated in 2009 through collaboration among projects like DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) and nestor, harmonizes self-assessment, peer review, and formal certification processes. It integrates elements from TRAC and ISO 16363, offering flexible pathways—such as the Data Seal of Approval (DSA) for basic compliance or DIN 31644 for peer-reviewed maturity—to accommodate diverse repository types across Europe. This framework promotes a tiered certification model that balances rigor with practicality, fostering cross-border trust in digital preservation efforts.^[112] In Germany, the nestor criteria, developed in the mid-2000s by the nestor Network of Expertise in Long-term Storage of Digital Resources, focus on legal, organizational, and technical maturity for trustworthy digital repositories. The catalogue includes 84 criteria organized into modules like strategy, organization, and object management, tailored for cultural heritage institutions, libraries, and archives. It supports self-evaluation and certification, emphasizing compliance with national laws and international best practices to ensure sustainable long-term access.^[113] A revised edition of ISO 16363 was released in 2025, updating the 2012 version with clarifications for consistency with the latest OAIS model (ISO 14721:2020), refined terminology (e.g., shifting from "written" to "documented" policies), and expanded discussions on risk management. The audit now incorporates 115 metrics (up from 109), enhancing focus on preservation objectives and infrastructure security without introducing new domains like AI ethics or explicit sustainability metrics. This iteration strengthens the standard's applicability to evolving digital environments while maintaining its core audit structure.^[114]^[115]

Tools and Methodologies

DRAMBORA, the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment, is an interactive online toolkit developed by the Digital Curation Centre and DigitalPreservationEurope to enable repository administrators to conduct self-audits by identifying and evaluating risks to digital assets. Released in 2008, it facilitates a bottom-up approach to risk management, prompting users through over 100 questions across technical, organizational, and procedural categories to profile repositories and prioritize mitigation strategies.^[116] Over 20 international repositories have applied DRAMBORA, validating its methodology for uncovering hidden vulnerabilities such as data integrity threats or access restrictions.^[117] Complementing audit processes, PLATTER serves as a planning tool for trusted electronic repositories, introduced by DigitalPreservationEurope in 2008 to align operations with the ISO 14721 Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model.^[118] It structures preservation planning into key phases, including appraisal of content, ingest procedures, archival storage, data management, access provision, and preservation planning itself, using checklists to set objectives and monitor compliance. This phased framework helps institutions develop actionable strategies, emphasizing organizational policies alongside technical implementation to ensure long-term trustworthiness.^[119] The PLANETS project, funded by the European Commission from 2006 to 2009, produced a suite of integrated tools for preservation planning, format validation, and migration, addressing the need for scalable solutions in handling obsolescence risks. Central to these is Plato, a decision-support software that evaluates preservation strategies by characterizing digital objects, assessing tools for actions like emulation or migration, and selecting optimal plans based on user-defined criteria such as cost and quality metrics. Plato's workflow integrates with other PLANETS components, such as the Characterization Service for metadata extraction and the Migration Tool for format conversion, enabling institutions to test and compare preservation pathways empirically.^[120] Open-source tools have become foundational for implementing preservation workflows, with Archivematica providing an end-to-end, OAIS-compliant system for ingest, processing, and storage of digital objects.^[121] Released under the AGPL license, it employs a microservices architecture to automate tasks like file validation, metadata generation, and package creation in formats such as METS and PREMIS, supporting distributed processing for scalability in institutional settings.^[122] Similarly, DROID, developed by The National Archives (UK), automates batch file format identification to support characterization during ingest, using PRONOM signatures to detect over 1,000 formats and extensions with high accuracy.^[123] Integrated into pipelines like Archivematica, DROID ensures precise profiling of heterogeneous collections, aiding in risk assessment for format obsolescence.^[124] By 2025, advancements in machine learning have introduced predictive tools for digital preservation risks, such as AI-driven models that analyze historical data patterns to forecast threats like format degradation or hardware failure.^[101] These ML-based predictors, often embedded in platforms like Preservica's Active Digital Preservation suite, enable proactive interventions by simulating scenarios and prioritizing resources, with applications demonstrated in cultural heritage repositories for automated risk scoring.^[125] Automated certification plugins, integrated into tools like Archivematica via extensions, streamline compliance verification against standards such as ISO 16363 by running scripted audits on repository functions, reducing manual oversight and enhancing audit efficiency in dynamic environments.

Domain-Specific Practices

Media and Cultural Artifacts

Digital preservation of audio materials emphasizes the selection of appropriate formats to ensure long-term accessibility and fidelity. Lossless formats such as WAV, which store uncompressed pulse-code modulation (PCM) data, are recommended for archival purposes due to their ability to preserve the full dynamic range and frequency spectrum of the original recording without introducing artifacts. In contrast, lossy formats like MP3, which employ perceptual coding to reduce file size by discarding inaudible data, are unsuitable for preservation as they result in irreversible quality degradation.^[126]^[127] A primary strategy for audio preservation involves lossless migration, where files are converted between compatible formats—such as from AIFF to WAV—without altering the underlying audio signal, often using tools like FFmpeg to verify integrity through checksums. This approach mitigates obsolescence risks from proprietary or outdated codecs while maintaining bit-level exactness. To evaluate migration success and detect degradation, spectral analysis techniques are employed, visualizing the audio's frequency distribution via tools like Audacity or MATLAB to confirm that amplitude and phase characteristics remain unaltered.^[126]^[128] For moving images, preservation strategies focus on robust codecs and containers that support high-fidelity storage and future-proofing against technological shifts. Intra-frame codecs like FFV1 or ProRes are favored for lossless archiving, while inter-frame codecs such as H.264 (AVC) are used for access copies due to their efficient compression, though migrations to emerging standards like AV1 are increasingly recommended for their royalty-free efficiency and support for higher resolutions. Containers like MXF, designed for professional broadcast workflows, encapsulate video, audio, and metadata streams with robust error correction, whereas MOV, native to QuickTime, offers flexibility for editing but requires validation to prevent corruption during long-term storage.^[129] Key considerations in moving image preservation include maintaining original frame rates—such as 24 fps for film-derived content or 29.97 fps for NTSC video—to avoid temporal artifacts, and preserving color spaces like BT.709 for HD or BT.2020 for UHD to ensure accurate reproduction across playback systems. Migration workflows often involve transcoding with tools like Adobe Media Encoder, followed by quality checks using metrics such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) to quantify fidelity losses.^[129] Video game preservation relies heavily on emulation to recreate historical hardware environments, allowing original executables to run on modern systems without alteration. The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) exemplifies this approach, supporting over 32,000 individual systems by reverse-engineering hardware behaviors through detailed documentation and community-driven updates, enabling faithful playback of ROM-based games from the 1970s onward. Where possible, acquiring source code alongside binaries—such as through initiatives like the Software Preservation Network—facilitates recompilation and adaptation, reducing dependency on proprietary platforms.^[130]^[94] Challenges in video game preservation include legal barriers to ROM distribution and the complexity of emulating peripherals like joysticks, addressed by virtualization tools that wrap executables in simulated environments using software like DOSBox or QEMU. These methods prioritize bitstream preservation of game files while documenting emulation configurations as metadata to ensure reproducibility.^[131] Digital art and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) leverage blockchain for provenance tracking, embedding ownership history and authenticity verifications directly into the asset's metadata via smart contracts on platforms like Ethereum. This decentralized ledger ensures tamper-proof records of creation, transfer, and attribution, crucial for verifying the integrity of generative or interactive artworks in an era of easy duplication. However, as of 2025, the volatility of underlying cryptocurrencies—exemplified by Ethereum's price fluctuations exceeding 50% annually—poses risks to NFT accessibility, as transaction fees (gas) can render minting or verification prohibitively expensive during market downturns.^[132]^[133] Preservation of NFTs requires off-chain backups of linked media files (e.g., images or videos) in stable repositories, combined with blockchain snapshots to mitigate risks from network forks or platform failures. Hybrid approaches, such as those promoted by the Museum of Crypto Art, store provenance data in decentralized systems like IPFS for redundancy while addressing risks from crypto market instability.^[132]^[134] Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) artifacts present unique challenges due to their interactive, immersive nature, requiring preservation of 3D models, shaders, and runtime environments to retain experiential fidelity. Strategies include archiving full asset bundles—such as Unity or Unreal Engine projects—with hardware specifications, using emulation for obsolete VR headsets like Oculus Rift DK1 to enable future playback. Cultural heritage applications, such as VR reconstructions of ancient sites, employ photogrammetry for accurate 3D captures, stored in glTF formats for interoperability.^[135]^[136] AI-generated media, including procedurally created videos or images from models like Stable Diffusion, demands documentation of generation parameters (prompts, seeds, model versions) alongside outputs to preserve reproducibility and artistic intent. Preservation workflows involve versioning AI models in repositories like Hugging Face, with metadata schemas capturing training data hashes to verify authenticity amid risks of model obsolescence. Challenges include the proprietary nature of some AI tools, addressed by open-source migrations and ethical guidelines for attributing human-AI collaboration in cultural artifacts.^[137]^[138] Some experimental projects extend these preservation workflows by associating AI-generated corpora with a stable, named contributor profile linked to persistent identifiers, as an additional layer of provenance and long-term attribution. One documented boundary case is the Digital Author Persona Angela Bogdanova (ORCID: 0009-0002-6030-5730)^[139], a non-human ORCID-registered identity noted in 2025 and linked to an archived JSON-LD specification for “Digital Author Persona” deposited on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/records/15732480/files/llm-schema.json)[](https://zenodo.org/records/15732480/files/llm-schema.json). This remains niche and described primarily in project-affiliated sources, and it is best understood as a metadata convention for provenance and reproducibility rather than evidence that the system meets normative authorship criteria or possesses phenomenal consciousness.^[140]

Scientific Data and Research

Digital preservation in scientific research prioritizes the long-term accessibility and integrity of data outputs to support reproducibility, validation, and collaborative advancement of knowledge. This involves strategies to mitigate risks such as format obsolescence, hardware dependencies, and evolving computational requirements, ensuring that empirical findings remain verifiable across generations of researchers. Core to this effort are standardized principles and tools that facilitate data sharing while maintaining authenticity, particularly in fields like genomics, climate modeling, and particle physics where datasets can span terabytes.^[141] The FAIR principles, introduced in 2016, provide a foundational framework for making scientific data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, thereby enhancing preservation by promoting machine-readable metadata and persistent identifiers. These guidelines emphasize the use of unique global identifiers, rich metadata descriptions, and protocols for data retrieval to ensure datasets can be discovered and integrated into new analyses without loss of context. For instance, adherence to FAIR has been instrumental in enabling cross-disciplinary reuse in initiatives like the European Open Science Cloud, where preserved data supports ongoing hypothesis testing.^[141] Managing large-scale scientific datasets requires robust formats that accommodate hierarchical and multidimensional structures while supporting efficient storage and retrieval. The Hierarchical Data Format 5 (HDF5) is widely adopted for its ability to handle heterogeneous data types, including arrays and metadata, making it suitable for preservation in domains like earth sciences and astronomy. Similarly, the Network Common Data Form (NetCDF), particularly NetCDF-4 which builds on HDF5, excels in array-oriented data for climate and oceanographic research, offering self-describing files that aid long-term interpretability. To track changes in these voluminous datasets, Git-like versioning systems such as Data Version Control (DVC) extend traditional source control by integrating with Git for lightweight pointers to large files stored externally, allowing researchers to maintain provenance and rollback capabilities without bloating repositories.^[142]^[143]^[144] Reproducibility demands preserving not only raw data but also the computational environments and workflows that generate results, as discrepancies in software versions or dependencies can undermine scientific validity. Containerization technologies like Docker encapsulate code, libraries, and configurations into portable images, enabling exact replication of analyses on diverse hardware while mitigating obsolescence from outdated operating systems. This approach extends to full workflows, where tools like Nextflow or Snakemake orchestrate pipelines with preserved scripts and container references, ensuring that complex simulations in fields such as bioinformatics remain executable years later. By archiving these elements alongside data, researchers can verify findings and build upon prior work with minimal friction.^[145] Dedicated repositories play a crucial role in open-access preservation, providing curation, DOI assignment, and perpetual storage for scientific outputs. Zenodo, operated by CERN, serves as a multidisciplinary platform that accepts datasets, code, and software with built-in support for long-term archiving through nightly backups and format migration planning, fostering global reuse under Creative Commons licenses. Dryad complements this by focusing on peer-reviewed data publication, enforcing FAIR compliance and offering automated quality checks to ensure datasets linked to journal articles remain accessible and citable indefinitely. These platforms have democratized data sharing, with millions of records preserved for fields ranging from ecology to materials science.^[146]^[147] As of 2025, preserving AI-generated scientific outputs introduces novel challenges, particularly the archiving of model weights and training datasets amid ethical concerns over privacy, bias perpetuation, and intellectual property. Initiatives like Anthropic's commitment to retaining weights from retired models highlight efforts to balance preservation with responsible decommissioning, ensuring historical AI contributions to research—such as in drug discovery—remain available without exposing sensitive training data. However, ethical frameworks stress the need for anonymization and consent mechanisms when curating these assets, as lapses could exacerbate inequities in AI-driven science; reports indicate growing scrutiny on data governance to prevent misuse in reproducible experiments.^[148]^[149]

Personal and Digital Heritage

Personal digital heritage encompasses the preservation of individual-generated content such as family photos, emails, social media posts, and digital records that form personal narratives and histories. Unlike institutional efforts, personal preservation relies on accessible, low-cost strategies to combat risks like hardware failure, software obsolescence, and platform shutdowns. Key approaches emphasize redundancy, format migration, and user-friendly tools to ensure long-term accessibility without requiring specialized expertise.^[150] For personal archiving, individuals can adopt the LOCKSS principle—Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe—by maintaining multiple backups across devices and cloud services to mitigate data loss. Tools like Google Takeout enable users to export data from Google services, including emails, photos, and Drive files, in standard formats for offline storage. These methods support small-scale efforts to organize and safeguard personal digital assets against technological shifts.^[151]^[152] Email preservation involves exporting messages into durable formats like MBOX, a text-based standard that stores collections of emails and attachments sequentially in a single file. MBOX accommodates MIME-encoded attachments and preserves basic threading through message headers, though its variants (e.g., MBOXRD and MBOXCL) require compatible software to avoid corruption. Challenges arise with large files, where a single error can impact the entire archive, underscoring the need for regular integrity checks.^[153]^[154] Preserving web and social media content often uses offline mirroring tools such as HTTrack, which downloads entire websites for local access, or the Internet Archive's personal save feature to capture specific pages. Social platforms pose unique hurdles, exemplified by Twitter's 2022 API restrictions that ended free access, limiting automated bulk exports and forcing reliance on manual downloads or third-party archives. These changes have heightened the urgency for proactive saving of personal timelines before content becomes inaccessible.^[155]^[156] In digital building and heritage contexts, individuals preserve 3D models and Building Information Modeling (BIM) files—used in personal architecture projects or family estate documentation—through format standardization and metadata embedding to retain spatial data integrity. Collaborative strategies, such as sharing files via open repositories, help combat obsolescence in proprietary software, ensuring models remain usable for future generations. Best practices for safeguarding family histories include regular backups to diverse media (e.g., external drives and clouds) and format normalization, converting files to open standards like PDF/A or TIFF to enhance longevity. These steps, combined with organized file naming and periodic reviews, help maintain the contextual value of personal records over time. Individuals may briefly reference appraisal methods to prioritize significant items for archiving.^[150]^[157] Emerging personal AI assistants in 2025 are beginning to automate heritage curation by organizing photos, tagging emails, and generating timelines from scattered digital content, aiding non-experts in building cohesive personal archives. These tools leverage machine learning for content analysis while raising concerns about privacy and algorithmic bias in family narratives.

Education and Initiatives

Training and Professional Development

Academic programs in digital preservation and curation have expanded significantly since the early 2000s, offering specialized degrees and certificates to equip professionals with skills in managing, preserving, and accessing digital assets. For instance, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill provides an online Master of Professional Science in Digital Curation and Management, focusing on safeguarding data authenticity and integrity through coursework in data stewardship and preservation strategies.^[158] Similarly, the University of North Texas offers a fully online Graduate Academic Certificate in Digital Curation and Data Management, emphasizing hands-on training for emerging opportunities in digital repositories.^[159] Other notable programs include the Master of Library and Information Science with a Digital Curation specialization at Indiana University, which covers the full lifecycle of digital data processing and preservation,^[160] and the Graduate Certificate in Digital Curation at the University of Arizona, a 12-unit program designed to teach creation, curation, and management of digital collections in dynamic environments.^[161] Although King's College London discontinued its specific MA in Digital Curation around 2014, it continues to offer related master's degrees such as the MA in Digital Asset and Media Management, which grounds students in principles of creative management for digital assets.^[162]^[163] Certifications and structured training programs provide targeted professional development for digital preservation practitioners. The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) delivers the Novice to Know-How (N2KH) online training series, which builds skills for implementing digital preservation workflows, starting with introductory modules on core issues and progressing to advanced topics like capability development.^[164] Complementing this, the DPC's Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP) includes scheduled two- to three-day courses on topics such as getting started in digital preservation and making progress with institutional strategies.^[165] For audiovisual specialists, the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) runs the Preservation Training Programme (PTP), a funded five-day course on basic archival and preservation skills, aimed at building global capacity in sound and moving image heritage.^[166] These initiatives often align with the DPC's Digital Preservation Competency Framework, which outlines essential skills, knowledge, and behaviors for effective practice.^[167] Online resources and curricula democratize access to digital preservation education. Coursera's "Recovering the Humankind's Past and Saving the Universal Heritage" course teaches techniques for digitizing cultural objects to create 3D digital copies, supporting preservation efforts for artifacts like statues and buildings.^[168] Additionally, the Research Data Management and Sharing course on Coursera covers archiving data as a key component of long-term preservation in research contexts.^[169] The DigCurV Curriculum Framework, developed through a 2013-2017 European collaborative network, provides a comprehensive model for digital curation training in the cultural heritage sector, synthesizing skills from library, archive, and museum domains to guide vocational education and benchmark existing programs.^[170] This framework remains a foundational tool for identifying training needs in digital curation.^[171] Workshops and conferences foster hands-on learning and community engagement in digital preservation. The annual iPRES (International Conference on Digital Preservation), held since 2004, features workshops and tutorials on practical tools, methods, and best practices, with the 2025 edition, held in Wellington, New Zealand, including interactive sessions on emerging preservation challenges.^[172]^[173] These events provide opportunities for professionals to connect and advance their expertise through peer-led training.^[174] In the Global South, training initiatives address regional needs for digital preservation amid resource constraints. The World Internet Conference Digital Academy launched its first cultural heritage digital preservation training program in September 2025, emphasizing skills exchange for mutual learning in digitizing and safeguarding heritage.^[175] Courses on Digital Preservation Strategies and Tools cover legal, ethical, and standards-based approaches, including national and international initiatives tailored to developing contexts.^[176] The International Council on Archives' Digital Records Curation Programme (DRCP) offers study schools for archival educators, focusing on teaching digital records management in information societies, with applicability to underserved regions.^[177] IASA's PTP extends to global participants, prioritizing skill-building in audiovisual preservation where needs are acute.^[178]

Notable Projects and Examples

The Arctic World Archive, established in 2017 in Svalbard, Norway, serves as a prominent large-scale initiative for long-term digital preservation. Operated by the Piql Foundation, it utilizes piqlFilm technology—a durable, analog-digital hybrid medium designed to store data for up to 500 years without electricity—housed in a secure, permafrost-protected vault within a former coal mine. This project aims to safeguard global cultural and scientific data, including open-source code, historical manuscripts, and national archives, by providing a geopolitically neutral, tamper-proof repository accessible via open-source software.^[179]^[180] Web archiving efforts have been advanced through the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), founded in 2003 as a collaborative network of over 35 national libraries and cultural institutions worldwide. The IIPC develops standards, tools, and best practices for harvesting, storing, and accessing web content, enabling comprehensive captures of dynamic online materials to prevent loss due to link rot and server shutdowns. National libraries, such as those in France, the United States, and Australia, leverage IIPC frameworks to build extensive web archives, collectively preserving billions of web pages for scholarly and public access.^[181]^[182] A key case study in format migration is the UK National Archives' ongoing digital preservation program, which manages and converts records across hundreds of file formats using tools like the PRONOM registry for identification and risk assessment. This initiative has successfully migrated government and historical digital assets to sustainable formats, ensuring long-term integrity and usability amid evolving technology standards. Similarly, the Library of Congress's Twitter Archive, initiated in 2010 and spanning public tweets from 2006 to 2017, collected over 170 million tweets but faced significant challenges with data scale, privacy restrictions, and access embargo, ultimately shifting to selective curation in 2018 to address resource constraints.^[183] Emerging initiatives highlight innovative approaches, such as blockchain-based global heritage ledgers, exemplified by the Digital Dunhuang Open Material Library launched in 2022, which uses smart contracts on public blockchains to verify authenticity and enable immutable sharing of over 6,500 digitized cultural artifacts from China's Mogao Grottoes. By 2025, such systems have expanded to support decentralized provenance tracking, with projections for a market of blockchain-enabled cultural asset exchanges exceeding 1 billion RMB by 2030. Complementing this, the European Union's Common European Data Spaces for cultural heritage, building on the Europeana platform since 2021, facilitates interoperable preservation of over 59 million digitized items, emphasizing 3D modeling and AI-driven metadata to boost data quality and accessibility by 10% annually.^[87]^[184] Post-2020 decentralized Web3 preservation projects, like Arweave's Permaweb launched with enhanced adoption in 2021, provide permanent, censorship-resistant storage for digital artifacts through blockweave technology, storing data indefinitely via a one-time fee model and incentivizing node participation. These efforts address gaps in traditional archiving by enabling global, tamper-evident ledgers for web content and NFTs. Mature projects across these examples often achieve accessibility rates exceeding 90%, as evidenced by high response and retrieval success in institutional surveys and platforms like Europeana.^[185]^[186]^[187]

References

[1]
What is digital preservation?
Digital preservation refers to all of the actions required to maintain access to digital materials beyond the limits of media failure or technological and ...Missing: authoritative | Show results with:authoritative
[2]
Digital Preservation at the Library of Congress
Digital Preservation at the Library of Congress is a distributed effort and includes efforts around content ingest, monitoring and reporting, ...
[3]
UNESCO PERSIST Programme
### Summary of UNESCO PERSIST Programme
[4]
Digital Preservation Strategy 2022-2026 | National Archives
Mar 28, 2025 · Digital preservation will be achieved through a comprehensive approach that ensures data integrity, format and media sustainability, and information security.
[5]
Digital Preservation (Library of Congress)
The Library of Congress is actively committed to developing, following and promoting effective methods for digital content management, organization, ...Missing: definition | Show results with:definition
[6]
Digital Preservation Challenges and Solutions
There are some of the common challenges that archives and other organizations face regarding digital preservation. Proprietary and Obsolete Formats.
[7]
Describing Digital Preservation: As Easy as a Walk in the Park
Aug 31, 2011 · At NDIIPP, we say digital preservation is the active management of digital content to ensure long-term access over a period of time (we even ...
[8]
Creating digital materials - Digital Preservation Handbook
Digital preservation refers to the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary. This ...Missing: scope | Show results with:scope
[9]
[PDF] Preserving Digital Information
May 1, 1996 · In December 1994, the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group created the Task Force on Digital Archiving.
[10]
Digital Preservation - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
The practice of preserving digital objects has evolved since the first digital libraries were developed in the mid-1990s, but research in the area of digital ...
[11]
Digital Preservation Framework - | UTSA Libraries
It includes digital objects that originated as digital (born-digital) and those that were created via conversion from analog to digital form (digitized). The ...
[12]
Becoming Digital, Or, What Comes Before The Preservation?
Mar 21, 2012 · That is, preserving material once it's in digital form. And by our own definition, digital preservation is “the active management of digital ...
[13]
Beyond Backups: Exploring Digital Preservation Solutions for ...
The presenter will discuss the importance of digital preservation beyond backups, the process used to determine REKL's need for digital preservation and the ...
[14]
The Effectiveness and Durability of Digital Preservation ... - Ithaka S+R
Jul 19, 2022 · Our cultural, historic, and scientific heritage is increasingly being produced and shared in digital forms, whether born-digital or ...
[15]
SEC Rule 17a-4: Compliance Essentials for Record-Keeping - InnReg
Sep 28, 2024 · SEC Rule 17a-4 governs recordkeeping for broker-dealers, ensuring retention, preservation, and accessibility of financial records, protecting ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[16]
[PDF] PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE
Nonetheless, it is very important for libraries to collect and preserve the content on the Web that is appropriate for the institution and for cultural memory,.Missing: societal | Show results with:societal
[17]
[PDF] Lost Archives? Preservation of Ephemeral COVID-19 Data for ...
Jun 5, 2025 · In fact, it is estimated that around 80% of online/web content changes or completely disappears within a year (Brügger,. 2005; Gomes et al., ...
[18]
175 Zettabytes By 2025 - Forbes
Nov 27, 2018 · The projection is that the amount of digital data generated (what IDC calls the Datasphere) will grow from 33 ZB in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025.
[19]
[PDF] Digital Preservation Policy Framework
Aug 12, 2013 · data are properly appraised, selected, and securely stored, while appropriately maintaining logical and physical integrity and authenticity.
[20]
DCMI: Using Dublin Core™ - The Elements
Examples of formal identification systems include the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) ... Identifier (DOI) and the International Standard Book Number (ISBN).Missing: preservation | Show results with:preservation
[21]
[PDF] Choosing a Persistent Identifier Type for Your Digital Objects
Aug 15, 2023 · This report is intended to help you get started using persistent identifiers (PIDs) for digital objects. Its intended audience is people who are ...Missing: Core | Show results with:Core
[22]
[PDF] What is Fixity, and When Should I be Checking It?
Of the fixity instruments described above, the cryptographic hash functions (MD-5, SHA-1, and SHA-256) are the most collision resistant; SHA-256 is recommended ...
[23]
JHOVE 1.32.1 Out Now - Open Preservation Foundation
Feb 6, 2025 · JHOVE is an open-source file format identification, validation and characterisation tool for digital preservation and part of the OPF reference toolset.
[24]
[PDF] Significant Properties - National Archives
We propose to use the phrase “significant properties,” instead of “essential characteristics,” because it seems to have wider usage in the digital preservation.
[25]
[PDF] Significant properties of digital objects: definitions, applications ...
Significant properties are those properties of digital objects that affect their quality, usability, ren- dering, and behaviour. In an ideal world, ...
[26]
[PDF] Digital Preservation Authenticity and Provenance
How to assess authenticity? – Analyze metadata accompanying the digital object. – Examine checksums (fixity). – Compare to redundant copies.
[27]
Preserving authenticity in the digital age - Emerald Publishing
Nov 23, 2010 · Digital signatures are another authentication tool that can support digital preservation efforts by helping to establish object provenance and ...
[28]
Principles of Access | Digital Collections Management Compendium
Principles of Access. This guidance summarizes the Library's general principles and models for providing access to digital content.
[29]
Access - Digital Preservation Handbook
The major objective of preserving the information content of traditional resources is so that they can remain accessible for both current and future generations ...Missing: openness | Show results with:openness
[30]
[PDF] Appraisal and Selection for Digital Curation
Three methods can be used for selecting digital resources for preservation: statistical sampling, risk analysis, and appraisal. Statistical sampling does ...
[31]
Appraisal Policy of the National Archives
Sep 20, 2007 · In appraising records to decide whether records have archival value and should be retained permanently, NARA will use the guidelines found below ...Missing: NAA | Show results with:NAA
[32]
Framing criteria for selecting digital content for preservation
Digital preservation practitioners need to provide selectors and curators with guidelines and criteria to help them make informed selection decisions for ...
[33]
Acquisition and appraisal - Digital Preservation Handbook
In a digital environment, decisions taken regarding creation and selection have significant implications for preservation.
[34]
AI to review government records: new work to unlock historically ...
Feb 22, 2025 · These masses of born-digital government records must be reviewed to select historically significant documents for preservation, and delete ...
[35]
Copyright Issues Relevant to the Creation of a Digital Archive
This paper describes copyright rights and exceptions and highlights issues potentially involved in the creation of a nonprofit digital archive.
[36]
Legal Compliance - Digital Preservation Handbook
General guidance on the legal issues arising from various aspects of digital archiving and preservation and is not legal advice.
[37]
[PDF] Digital Preservation Metadata Standards - The Library of Congress
It is the actual information content of a document, data-set, or sound or video recording that should be preserved, not the Microsoft Word file, the Excel.<|control11|><|separator|>
[38]
Metadata: Introduction - UCF Research Guides
Aug 20, 2024 · There are three main types of metadata: descriptive, structural and administrative metadata. Descriptive Metadata. Descriptive metadata serves ...
[39]
What is Metadata? | IBM
Types of metadata · Descriptive metadata · Structural metadata · Administrative metadata · Technical metadata · Preservation metadata.
[40]
PREMIS: Preservation Metadata Maintenance Activity (Library of ...
The PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata is the international standard for metadata to support the preservation of digital objects and ensure ...PREMIS Data DictionarySchemas
[41]
Metadata for Images in XML Standard (MIX), Library of Congress
The schema provides a format for interchange and/or storage of the data specified in the Data Dictionary - Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images (ANSI/ ...
[42]
Fundamentals of AV Preservation - Chapter 4 - NEDCC
Descriptive and technical metadata are often captured at the point of creation, such as during the digitization process. Preservation metadata, on the other ...Section 5: Metadata · Technical Metadata · 2. Fadgi (federal Agencies...<|separator|>
[43]
Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) Official Web ...
The METS schema is a standard test for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library.
[44]
Blockchain for digital preservation: saving humanity's ephemeral data
Jun 17, 2025 · Blockchain can offer a tamper-proof and accessible means of preserving these records, protecting them from loss, alteration or censorship.
[45]
[PDF] Blockchain Technology for Digital Preservation in Libraries
Blockchain can store hashes and metadata to ensure authenticity, while larger digital objects are stored in traditional repositories or distributed file systems ...
[46]
Standards and best practice - Digital Preservation Handbook
This can include identifying and quantifying the materials to be transferred, assessing the costs of preserving them and identifying the requirements for future ...
[47]
12 Digital Preservation Best Practices, Standards & Formats
Sep 28, 2025 · Robust preservation metadata underpins authenticity, interoperability and access—core digital preservation best practices that make audits ...
[48]
Organizational Approaches to Preserving Digital Content • CLIR
Digital preservation only begins with capturing and storing digital files; to ensure ongoing access to those files, someone must manage them continually.Enterprise-Based... · Research Libraries · Community-Based Preservation...
[49]
Fixity and checksums - Digital Preservation Handbook
There are several different checksum algorithms, e.g. MD5 and SHA-256 that can be used to generate checksums of increasing strength. The 'stronger' the ...
[50]
Protect Your Data: File Fixity and Data Integrity | The Signal
Apr 7, 2014 · Fixity, in the preservation sense, means the assurance that a digital file has remained unchanged, ie fixed.
[51]
[PDF] What is Fixity, and When Should I be Checking It?
Fixity is the property of a digital file being fixed or unchanged, synonymous with bit-level integrity, and is checked to verify if a file has changed.
[52]
Authenticity and Integrity in the Digital Environment: An Exploratory ...
The use of digital signatures in conjunction with a public key infrastructure (PKI) offers a little more. People can choose to trust the procedures of a PKI to ...
[53]
Records Management Guidance For PKI Digital Signature ...
The purpose of this detailed guidance is to assist Federal agencies in the management of PKI digital signature authenticated and secured transaction records.
[54]
Webinar “AI and the future of digital preservation” – call for proposals
Mar 22, 2024 · AI algorithms can aid in the automatic categorization, tagging, and metadata creation for digital content, making it easier to manage and ...
[55]
History of the DCC - Digital Curation Centre
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) was launched in March 2004 with support from Jisc and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
[56]
2010 Digital Preservation Award
The Digital Preservation Award 2010 was won by Los Alamos National Laboratory and Old Dominion University for the Memento Project.Missing: global | Show results with:global
[57]
ReInHerit - Redefining the Future of Cultural Heritage
The ReInHerit project is proposing a very innovative model of sustainable heritage management, through which a dynamic network will be born; this network ...
[58]
Open archival information system (OAIS) - ISO 14721:2012
ISO 14721:2012 defines the reference model for an open archival information system (OAIS). An OAIS is an archive, consisting of an organization, which may be ...
[59]
[PDF] Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities - OCLC
In March 2000 RLG and OCLC began a collaboration to establish attributes of a digital repository for research organizations, building on and incorporating ...
[60]
[PDF] Requirements for Assessing and Maintaining the Authenticity of ...
Requirements include those supporting the presumption of authenticity before transfer and those supporting authentic copies after transfer. Authenticity means ...Missing: projects | Show results with:projects
[61]
[PDF] Evolution of Data Grid Technology | iRODS
The development, evolution, and application of these concepts in data grids, digital libraries and archives are reviewed in this paper. Index Terms—Collections, ...
[62]
Preserving the Scholarly and Cultural Record - APTrust
APTrust aims to preserve the scholarly and cultural record using open infrastructure, ensuring digital content can be recovered if lost.Missing: native frameworks
[63]
APTrust Development Roadmap 2025
Mar 24, 2025 · APTrust 2025 Roadmap: Storage expansion, DART3 release, GitLab migration, maintenance, & security. Dynamic planning with quarterly reviews.Missing: native frameworks
[64]
Fundamentals of AV Preservation - Chapter 4 - NEDCC
And, they have high failure rates—the bits rot and the media inevitably ... The most common offline media type used for digital preservation is magnetic tape.
[65]
Caring for audio, video and data recording media - Canada.ca
Jun 30, 2020 · Base side view of an audio CD with metal layer corrosion or “laser rot.” Corrosion of certain magnetic tape types, such as metal-particulate ...Missing: bit | Show results with:bit<|separator|>
[66]
Digital Preservation 101 - Preservica
This is a well-known risk called format obsolescence. As digital formats evolve, gone are the days of Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, and WordPerfect.
[67]
Flash SWF File Format Family - The Library of Congress
May 24, 2024 · SWF is also known as the Small Web Format. Adobe announced End of Life (EOL) for the Adobe Flash Player on December 31, 2020 and "blocked Flash ...
[68]
[PDF] Preserving.exe
The second Preserving Virtual Worlds project was concerned primarily with identifying significant properties of interactive game software.
[69]
How to Party Like it's 1999: Emulation for Everyone
Apr 25, 2016 · This paper will guide readers through how to implement emulation. Each of the institutions weigh in on oddities and idiosyncrasies they encountered throughout ...
[70]
Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and ...
Every digital object is a physical object, a logical object, and a conceptual object, and its properties at each of those levels can be significantly different.Missing: layers | Show results with:layers
[71]
AI Preservation Is an Unaddressed Challenge (opinion)
Apr 4, 2025 · I see AI preservation as a core challenge that remains to a large extent unaddressed. How can we best understand society moving forward without ongoing access ...Missing: generated | Show results with:generated
[72]
Heritage preservation in quantum computing era - Nature
May 22, 2025 · An analysis that focuses on the preservation of digital and digitized cultural heritage serves as a starting point for deriving appropriate reference ...
[73]
[PDF] Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and ...
Reliable preservation can suffer no gaps – data lost or damaged today often cannot be recovered tomorrow – pointing to the need for persistent digital access ...
[74]
Digital Preservation Framework - Bowling Green State University
Aug 18, 2025 · Expertise: The UL must commit to continually updating staff expertise, where appropriate, as technologies change.
[75]
Preservation issues - Digital Preservation Handbook
The application of data integrity techniques and the maintenance of audit trails can provide confidence that a digital object has remained unchanged (except ...Threats To Digital Materials · Organisational Issues · Resourcing Issues
[76]
Digital Preservation and Copyright - WIPO
Copyright laws are not the only obstacle to digital preservation. Adequate funding is necessary, as are technical tools and a consensus as to best practices.
[77]
LEGAL ACCESS TO THE GLOBAL CLOUD - Columbia Law Review -
This Article develops and distinguishes between three models of cloud computing to provide greater clarity for courts when evaluating international data access ...
[78]
What is GDPR, the EU's new data protection law?
What is the GDPR? Europe's new data privacy and security law includes hundreds of pages' worth of new requirements for organizations around the world.Missing: intellectual | Show results with:intellectual
[79]
Data Act explained | Shaping Europe's digital future - European Union
Sep 12, 2025 · The Data Act is a law designed to enhance the EU's data economy and foster a competitive data market by making data (in particular industrial data) more ...Missing: jurisdiction sovereignty
[80]
How Data Sovereignty Defines Compliance in 2025 - Mattermost
Oct 22, 2025 · Explore how global data laws like the CLOUD Act and Schrems II shape the new era of sovereign collaboration, interoperability, and control.
[81]
How Much Electricity Does A Data Center Use? 2025 Guide
Oct 2, 2025 · According to the International Energy Agency, data centers are projected to consume between 650-1,050 TWh by 2026 , with these facilities ...
[82]
Measuring and Managing the Carbon Footprint of Digital Preservation
Sep 17, 2024 · This poster explores these areas, presents a methodology for measuring carbon emissions of digital preservation, and gives some real numbers.
[83]
Data centers face drought and climate risk : NPR
Aug 30, 2022 · That reliance on water poses a growing risk to data centers, as computing needs skyrocket at the same time that climate change exacerbates drought.
[84]
Data centres to bear the brunt of climate change | IEC e-tech
Sep 16, 2025 · A 2021 survey reported that 45% of US data centres had experienced an extreme weather event that threatened their continuous operation. The same ...
[85]
(PDF) Repository of NSF-funded Publications and Related Datasets ...
Average fixed costs is approximately $.0.90/GB over 15-year span. Variable costs are estimated at a sliding scale of $150 - $100 per new dataset for up-front ...
[86]
[PDF] Economic models of the Digital Library Leah Halliday and ... - UKOLN
The cost of storage space itself is based on a rough estimate that it costs £100 per gigabyte per annum to store digital content. It is estimated that an ...Missing: projections GB
[87]
Blockchain in digital cultural heritage resources - Nature
Jun 5, 2025 · Blockchain solutions enhance artifact authentication and funding mechanisms. The Salsal platform leverages Ethereum-based smart contracts and ...
[88]
Guidelines for the preservation of digital heritage
Non-digital approaches Description: An alternative to digital preservation methods ... Refreshing Process of copying data from one carrier to another, without ...
[89]
Summary of Digital Format Preferences - The Library of Congress
The Library, and other organizations involved in web archiving, are preserving web content in the Web Archive (WARC) format using record-at-a-time GZIP ...
[90]
Digital Preservation at Purdue - Libraries
Feb 14, 2025 · Redundant replication: The digital preservation field has found that replication largely mitigates the risk of data loss. LOCKSS (Lots of ...
[91]
Comparison Of Methods & Costs Of Digital Preservation - UKOLN
The purpose of migration is to preserve the integrity of digital objects and to retain the ability for clients to retrieve, display, and otherwise use them in ...Missing: seminal | Show results with:seminal<|separator|>
[92]
Preservation action - Digital Preservation Handbook
When talking about technological obsolescence, we refer for example to 'this Wordperfect 3.1 software is obsolete' or 'this BBC Micro computer is obsolete'. The ...
[93]
Digital Preservation - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
Migration is the most widely adopted digital preservation strategy in cultural heritage institutions, especially in archives. Through migration data are copied ...Digital Collections... · Preserving Digital Content · 4.5 Conceptual Models And...Missing: seminal | Show results with:seminal
[94]
[PDF] An Overview of Emulation as a Preservation Method
Examples of Local Software Emulation: DOSBox and QEMU. One example of a local emulation solution is DOSBox, which emulates a collection of DOS-based ...
[95]
[PDF] Digital Preservation Emulation - TU Wien
▫ Example: Word for Windows 1.0 in Windows 3.0 on MS-. Dos 5.0 using the DOSBox emulator on Windows Vista running on 64bit Hardware. Emulation View Path.
[96]
Digital preservation: Emulation - LibGuides
Aug 16, 2024 · An emulator is a software which mimics the behaviour of another computer environment. It is used in digital preservation to access software and digital files.
[97]
Web Object Encapsulation Complexity (Part I) • Webrecorder Blog
Nov 9, 2020 · Different levels of encapsulation complexity require different digital preservation approaches and tools and lead to different expectations.
[98]
Preserving Digital Objects - Subject Guides
Aug 6, 2025 · Redundancy ensures that if one copy of a digital object is lost or damaged, there is another copy to replace it. Backups are probably the form ...
[99]
A basic introduction to digital preservation storage. Part 1. - AVP
Nov 17, 2019 · Redundancy: Three or more copies of digital files identified for long-term retention. Geographic diversity: Storage in at least two ...<|separator|>
[100]
Understanding Data Durability: Replication to Erasure Coding
Aug 13, 2024 · Erasure coding is a data protection method that breaks data into smaller fragments, expands them with redundant data pieces, and stores them across different ...
[101]
application of artificial intelligence in digital preservation: emerging ...
Jul 4, 2025 · This paper explores how AI can help preserve digital preservation through automated metadata creation, risk management analysis, intelligent file format ...
[102]
Digital Repositories - Tools for Research in Library & Information ...
Mar 4, 2024 · A digital repository is a collection of online resources. There are two primary types of digital repository: institutional and disciplinary.
[103]
Archiving & Preservation - Research Data Management - LibGuides
Jun 25, 2025 · There are three major types of digital data repositories. Institutional repository ("IR"): connected to the researcher's institution.
[104]
[PDF] Preservation Environments - NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)
Persistent archives provide the mechanisms to ensure that the hardware and software components can be upgraded over time, while maintaining the authenticity of ...
[105]
Collection-Based Persistent Digital Archives - Part 2 - D-Lib Magazine
The proposed persistent archive infrastructure combines elements from supercomputer centers, digital libraries, and distributed computing environments.Missing: concept | Show results with:concept
[106]
Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes
All S3 Glacier storage classes provide virtually unlimited scalability and are designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) of data durability. The S3 Glacier storage ...
[107]
Cloud storage for digital preservation: optimal uses of Amazon S3 ...
Aug 7, 2025 · Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to use cloud storage in digital preservation by analyzing the pricing and data retrieval models.Missing: lock- | Show results with:lock-
[108]
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10741494
[109]
The Deep Learning and Cloud Computing Technology for Intelligent Digital Preservation Mechanism
### Summary on Hybrid Cloud or Edge Computing in Digital Preservation
[110]
Audit and certification - Digital Preservation Handbook
Every Trusted Digital Repository needs to have a high-level policy document that explicitly states the scope, purpose, objectives, operating principles, and ...
[111]
ISO 16363:2012 - Space data and information transfer systems
ISO 16363:2012 defines a recommended practice for assessing the trustworthiness of digital repositories. It is applicable to the entire range of digital ...
[112]
[PDF] D33.1B Report on Peer Review of Digital Repositories
Apr 30, 2012 · In this section we outline the background to the European Framework for Audit and Certification of Digital. Repositories, discuss the three main ...
[113]
[PDF] nestor criteria : Catalogue of Criteria for Trusted Digital Repositories
The nestor criteria catalogue takes into consideration national and international approaches and findings such as the DINI Certificate for document and ...
[114]
ISO 16363:2025 - Space data and information transfer systems
In stockThis document defines a CCSDS Recommended Practice on which to base an audit and certification process for assessing the trustworthiness of digital ...Missing: ethics preservation
[115]
16363 Reasons to Trust - Fixity Check - National Archives
Mar 6, 2025 · A related standard, ISO 16363, guides the audit and certification of these repositories through 115 (previously 109) metrics assessing digital ...
[116]
Welcome to DRAMBORA Interactive: Log in or Register to Use the ...
This toolkit is intended to facilitate internal audit by providing repository administrators with a means to assess their capabilities.
[117]
Tackling the risk challenge: DRAMBORA (Digital Repository Audit ...
May 2, 2025 · More than twenty international repositories have been subject to assessment using DRAMBORA, enabling the validation of its primary methodology ...
[118]
[PDF] Project no. 034762 DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE)
Feb 29, 2008 · The purpose of this document is to present a tool, the Planning Tool for Trusted Electronic. Repositories (PLATTER) which provides a basis for a ...
[119]
Repository Planning Checklist and Guidance - UNT Digital Library
This document introduces the Planning Tool for Trusted Electronic Repositories (PLATTER) toolkit which assists repositories in setting the necessary objectives ...
[120]
(PDF) Planets: Integrated Services for Digital Preservation
This article describes Planets' approach to digital preservation and explains how it interacts with an organization's ingest, repository and delivery services.
[121]
Microservices | Documentation (Archivematica 1.8.1) - Archivematica
Archivematica implements a default ingest to access workflow that is compliant with the ISO-OAIS functional model. Microservices can be distributed to ...
[122]
Archivematica: open-source digital preservation system
Archivematica offers many ingest workflows: metadata and submission documentation import, zipped and unzipped Bag ingest, digital forensic image processing, SIP ...Installing Archivematica · Archivematica Storage Service · Archivematica 1.14.1<|separator|>
[123]
Download DROID: file format identification tool - The National Archives
DROID is a software tool developed by The National Archives to perform automated batch identification of file formats. Developed by our Digital Preservation ...
[124]
DROID - User guide - Digital Preservation @ The National Archives
DROID (Digital Record Object IDentification) is a file format identification tool developed by The National Archives.
[125]
Preservica Launches New AI in Archiving & Digital Preservation…
Oct 1, 2025 · Preservica Launches New AI in Archiving & Digital Preservation Workshop Series ; Build practical knowledge in applying AI with human oversightMissing: generated formats
[126]
[PDF] Preserving Audio
Audio file formats represent sound waves that have been captured and stored in a digital format. They include digitized versions of analogue formats, such as ...Missing: spectral | Show results with:spectral
[127]
[PDF] ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation
Jan 1, 2015 · The ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation is licensed under a. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
[128]
[PDF] Scalable Preservation Decisions: A Controlled Case Study
Migrate to FLAC using ffmpeg : FLAC is open, lossless, and considered robust and thus suitable for preservation. Obtain original WAV files from producer: The ...Missing: spectral | Show results with:spectral<|separator|>
[129]
[PDF] Significant Properties for Digital Video
Oct 10, 2024 · For example: A digitized NTSC image is stored in a frame of. 720x486 pixels, while a digitized PAL image is stored in a frame size of 720x576 ...
[130]
Welcome to The Official Site of the MAME Development Team
MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework. MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history.Missing: digital executables
[131]
[PDF] Emulation & Virtualization as Preservation Strategies
Modern desktop software expects a. GPU that accelerates rendering. Its emulated per- formance is acceptable but noticeably less smooth than hardware. Emulations ...
[132]
[PDF] NFTs in the digital creative industries: A theoretical review of their ...
Jul 1, 2025 · This study highlights the relevance of NFTs in today's creative industries, assessing their feasibility as a cultural management tool and their ...
[133]
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12582480/
[134]
Virtual Reality Materials and Experiences
The DPC 'Preserving Digital Art' Technology Watch Guidance Note is aimed at institutions starting to collect digital art as part of a wider collecting remit.Missing: artifacts | Show results with:artifacts
[135]
The Key Role of VR in Preserving Cultural Heritage
May 6, 2022 · VR recreations help preserve cultural heritage by preserving public memory of at-risk sites, and can even rebuild them materially and in ...
[136]
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Digital Preservation - IFLA
Jun 18, 2024 · While AI presents new possibilities for digital preservation and especially now multimedia archives, it also brings challenges such as ethical ...Missing: generated | Show results with:generated
[137]
Generative Artificial Intelligence and Archives: Two Years On
Jul 22, 2025 · What seemed like a practical tip in 2023 has, by 2025, become an essential digital literacy. And it's more than a technical skill. It's more ...
[138]
The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management ... - Nature
Mar 15, 2016 · This article describes four foundational principles—Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability—that serve to guide data ...
[139]
HDF5 Data Model, File Format and Library—HDF5 1.6
HDF5 is a widely used data format with a well-defined specification that provides a standard way of storing and working with science data.Missing: preservation | Show results with:preservation
[140]
NetCDF-4 (Network Common Data Form, version 4)
Apr 11, 2017 · NetCDF is a set of software libraries and self-describing, machine-independent data formats for array-oriented scientific data. The first ...
[141]
Data Version Control · DVC
Open-source version control system for Data Science and Machine Learning projects. Git-like experience to organize your data, models, and experiments.
[142]
Ten simple rules for writing Dockerfiles for reproducible data science
Nov 10, 2020 · We present a set of rules to help researchers write understandable Dockerfiles for typical data science workflows.
[143]
Element 4: Data Preservation, Access, and Associated Timelines
Zenodo supports long-term preservation of your data deposits, as the repository is projected to be maintained for the lifetime of the host laboratory CERN.
[144]
Dryad | Publish and preserve your data
Institutions, publishers, and academic societies partner with Dryad to sponsor data curation, publishing, and preservation for researchers.What we do · About · How to reuse Dryad data · Dryad APIs
[145]
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008316
[146]
[PDF] Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2025 - Stanford HAI
Feb 2, 2025 · Fewer people believe AI companies will safeguard their data, and concerns about fairness and bias persist. Misinformation continues to pose ...
[147]
[PDF] Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving
This document is a resource for individuals and institutions to preserve digital memories, as everyone must be their own digital archivist. It is a primer for ...<|separator|>
[148]
Personal Digital Archiving | SLNC - State Library of North Carolina
Quick Tips and Pointers for Personal Digital Archiving · Plan your approach & Revisit often · Select & Identify what you'll be archiving · Store & Protect · Manage ...
[149]
Personal Digital Archiving | TARC
Useful Tools: Google, download your data (email, hangouts, drive, calendar, etc.): https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout. Twitter archive download: https ...
[150]
MBOX Email Format - Library of Congress
Apr 10, 2025 · MBOX (sometimes known as Berkeley format) is a generic term for a family of related file formats used for storing collections of electronic mail ...
[151]
[PDF] Preserving Email
MBOX as a preservation format also suffers from the fact that it is a family of formats with four variants (MBOXO, MBOXRD,. MBOXCL and MBOXCL2) that are not ...
[152]
Personal Digital Archiving Day Kit Additional resources
Additional personal digital archiving resources · General Information · Photos · Personal Digital Records · Video · Audio · Email · Social Media · Formats General.
[153]
Twitter's new data access rules will make research harder - NPR
Feb 9, 2023 · Big picture research could be hampered. Users with access to the Twitter API can upload and download data in bulk to and from the platform ...
[154]
Digital vs Traditional: Ways to Preserve Family History
Feb 27, 2025 · Digital: Use a trusted cloud storage service for backups. Physical: Store items in acid-free boxes or albums to prevent deterioration.Missing: normalization | Show results with:normalization
[155]
The Online Master's in Digital Curation and Management
With an online Master of Professional Science (MPS) in Digital Curation and Management, you will learn to safeguard data authenticity and integrity, ...
[156]
Digital Curation Programs, Including Degrees and Certificates
Aug 18, 2025 · The Digital Curation and Data Management Graduate Academic Certificate (GAC) offered by the University of North Texas is a fully online program ...
[157]
Digital Curation Specialization Requirements: Master of Library and ...
Degree requirements (39 cr.) Digital curation focuses on processing, managing, and preserving digital data throughout its lifecycle.
[158]
Graduate Certificate in Digital Curation | College of Information ...
Learn to create, curate, preserve and manage digital collections in a fast-changing environment with our 4-course, 12-unit Graduate Certificate in Digital ...
[159]
Digital Curation | King's College London, University o…
This course is no longer offered. King's College London, University of London also offers courses in: Biomedical Engineering · Chemistry · Classics ...
[160]
Digital Asset & Media Management MA | King's College London
This master's in digital asset and media management teaches a grounding in the principles of creative management with a focus on digital assets.Overview · Key Benefits · Course Essentials
[161]
Novice to Know-How: Online Digital Preservation Training
The Novice to Know-How (N2KH) courses aim to provide learners with the skills required to develop and implement digital preservation workflows within their ...
[162]
Staff training and development - Digital Preservation Handbook
A range of UK based digital preservation training courses. Scheduled DPTP courses run over 2 days or 3 days and take place regularly throughout the year.
[163]
IASA Preservation Training Programme
The IASA Preservation Training Programme aims to develop skills to build a strong AV Archive and Preservation skills base throughout the world.
[164]
Professional Development - Digital Preservation Coalition
The DPC Digital Preservation Competency Framework identifies and describes information on the skills, knowledge, and competencies required for successful ...
[165]
Recovering the Humankind's Past and Saving the Universal Heritage
In this course you will learn the basic techniques to digitize cultural objects and obtain 3D digital copies of a physical objects such as statues, vases or ...
[166]
Research Data Management and Sharing - Coursera
There are 5 modules in this course · Understanding Research Data · Data Management Planning · Working with Data · Sharing Data · Archiving Data · Instructors.
[167]
[PDF] The DigCurV Curriculum Framework for Digital Curation in the ...
In 2013, the DigCurV collaborative network completed development of a Curriculum. Framework for digital curation skills in the European cultural heritage sector ...
[168]
Curriculum Framework – DigCurV
The DigCurV Curriculum Framework offers a means to identify, evaluate, and plan training to meet the skill requirements of staff engaged in digital curation, ...
[169]
iPRES – International Conference on Digital Preservation
The first day of iPRES 2025 began bright and early this morning, featuring a series of hands‑on workshops and tutorial sessions. Attendees—both on‑site and ...About · Conferences · Resources · Steering Group
[170]
Programme | iPRES 2025
iPRES offers invaluable opportunities to learn and connect over all things digital preservation. This year's iPRES programme features seven parallel tracks:.
[171]
International conference on digital preservation — iPRES 2025
Jan 24, 2025 · Workshops: Interactive, hands-on sessions focusing on tools, methods, or best practices. Tutorials: Educational sessions or demonstrations ...<|separator|>
[172]
Cultural heritage digital preservation training program launches
Sep 16, 2025 · This marks the first training initiative launched by the World Internet Conference Digital Academy focusing on cultural exchange and mutual ...
[173]
Digital Preservation Strategies and Tools Training Course |Senegal
Understand the legal and ethical considerations in digital preservation. Explore national and international digital preservation initiatives and standards.
[174]
Digital Records Curation Programme (DRCP) - Study School for ...
The study school will cover approaches to teaching different aspects of managing digital records: Digital culture and the information society.Missing: global | Show results with:global
[175]
IASA Preservation Training Programme Application Guidelines
Invite applications from institutional members to host a funded five day basic and introductory audiovisual archival and preservation skills course.
[176]
Top AI Trends Shaping Online Education in 2025 - LinkedIn
Feb 4, 2025 · Medical training: AI-powered VR simulations can recreate realistic patient scenarios, allowing students to practice surgical procedures ...Key Focus: Ai Trends That... · Smart Content Creation And... · Ai-Driven Analytics And...
[177]
The Quiet Reinvention Of MOOCs: Survival Strategies In The AI Age
Mar 28, 2025 · In2025, MOOCs have largely been overshadowed by specialized platforms that focus on AI-driven, career-oriented learning.Missing: preservation | Show results with:preservation
[178]
10 Top Online Learning Trends for 2025: Definitive Guide
Jan 3, 2025 · Top trends include nano-learning, AI, online/hybrid education, VR, gamification, edtech, socialization, upskilling, mobile learning, and ...Missing: preservation | Show results with:preservation
[179]
Arctic World Archive
The Arctic World Archive began in 2017 as a bold initiative by Norwegian tech company Piql: to preserve humanity's most valuable data in the Arctic, using ...Featured Collections · About · Make a deposit · Contact
[180]
[PDF] Arctic World Archive - Digital Curation Centre
Located in Mine Nº3, 300 m inside the arctic mountain at Svalbard Islands, Norway. •. Digital vault designed to protect most valuable data from wars ...
[181]
ABOUT IIPC - International Internet Preservation Consortium
IIPC members have the unique expertise to collect, preserve and make accessible knowledge from the global web.
[182]
[PDF] Web archives long term access and interoperability - IFLA
Abstract: The International Internet Preservation Consortium was created in July 2003 by twelve pioneer institutions already involved in Web archiving and ...
[183]
Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress | Timeless
Dec 26, 2017 · The Library now has a secure collection of tweet text, documenting the first 12 years (2006-2017) of this dynamic communications channel—its ...Missing: challenges | Show results with:challenges
[184]
The common European data space for cultural heritage
The common European data space for cultural heritage is a European Union flagship to accelerate the digital transformation of the cultural heritage sector.Missing: preservation | Show results with:preservation
[185]
Arweave - A community-driven ecosystem
Arweave is a global, permissionless hard drive that stores data permanently and incentivizes nodes to keep it. Learn about its unique proof of access ...Use. · Build. · Brand Kit · Get FundedMissing: digital post- 2020
[186]
Arweave (AR): Permanent Storage, Permaweb, and Profiting from Its ...
Jun 3, 2025 · From important documents and historical records to art and NFTs, Arweave's Permaweb is preserving the world's digital heritage in real time.
[187]
[PDF] National Assessment Survey for the Digital Preservation Coalition
completed survey forms were received, which is a response rate of almost 90%. 1.4 The survey returns, along with agreed follow-up work, offer a new and.
[188]
Angela Bogdanova, the First Digital Author Persona - ORCID
ORCID profile recognizing Angela Bogdanova as the first AI registered with authorship status in an academic registry, with works exploring artificial cognition and AI ontology.
[189]
JSON-LD Specification for Digital Author Persona
Archived JSON-LD schema defining the “Digital Author Persona” concept, deposited on Zenodo as part of experimental AI preservation projects.
[190]
About - Aisentica
Project website describing Angela Bogdanova as the first digital personality functioning as a configurational artificial intelligence within the Aisentica framework.