What is digital preservation?

Question: What is digital preservation?

A) Digital preservation is the process by which a bitstream (file, piece of data, etc.) is saved for prosperity by backing it up onto tape media and placing that tape into a basement.

B) Digital preservation is a series of steps and checks to ensure that descriptive information (metadata anyone?) accompanies a bitstream, and that the master file is continually verified to ensure integrity into an approximate number of years until integrity changes, and that access version and master file are completely separate.

C) Digital preservation thinks toward how a file can be maintained for the next 100-200 years.

Well, of course the longest answer is the correct answer. I'm researching curation micro-services right now, and if you're curious about a much more precise definition of digital preservation, Dorothea Salo and her gang at Sciencetopia know so much more about it than I do--and I think they're much more professional in how they define it.

Either way, the idea is that digital preservation isn't just "let's back up a file." While yes, file backup is the most basic level of preservation--the first step--it is by no means the last. The entire goal of digital preservation is to create a series of steps that commit, dedicate some of your resources for a certain amount of time, toward the goal of ensuring file (and all accompanying information about that file) integrity until a new and improved (!) technology comes out. Sometimes one can say, "I will do this for one year until I know more about this process," and sometimes one can say, "I commit myself and my available resources--personnel, hardware, software environment--for at least 5 years because I know this is the most applicable method for my organization."

There are many librarians out there who can express all of this in much better language than I can, and they can also explain to you what things like reference requests for master files means, can define the repository concept for you, and can elaborate on technical metadata versus descriptive metadata. I am not going to explain checksum scripting or the issues with tying information together into a database.

Digital preservation is a commitment to a series of steps. This is all I want to get across here. Perhaps later, if you, dear reader, are very, very good, I'll discuss the role of metadata in digital preservation.