Digital Preservation

The following processes and information is based on the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NSDA) Levels of Digital Preservation implementation, assessment, and curatorial guidelines.¹

“The Levels of Digital Preservation are a tiered set of guidelines and practices intended to offer clear, baseline suggestions on preserving digital content” (Levels of Preservation Revisions Working Group, 2019)² These guidelines are just that: guidelines. The benefit of these different levels is that they can be customized dependent on the needs of the institution, department, or project.

There are some definitions that might be unfamiliar to those not working closely with digital preservation or born-digital archival materials. A few common ones are listed below, but NSDA has a more extensive document. You can also look at the Digital Preservation Vocabulary list here.

1. File fixity: Characteristics that indicate a digital object’s bitstream hasn’t changed over time. Just because something is born-digital or made into a digital format doesn’t mean it will last forever.
2. Ingest: Process in which a digital item or metadata package is added to a repository. For example, we used the FRED computer to ingest materials onto Spec’s partition of the Archive Drive.
3. Integrity Information: Used to verify over time that the content hasn’t been altered (loss, tampering, corruption).
4. Migration: Transferring digital materials from one hardware/software generation to the next newest, or from one format to another.
5. Sustainable File Formats (or Normalization): Converting files to preservation format during ingest. See the Library of Congress Recommended Formats Statement 2023-2024.

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Formats and Digitization In-House Capabilities

To see the equipment and material formats³ - both physical and digital - that are found in Spec, see the Digitization Equipment and Material Formats spreadsheet.

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Sources