Digital Preservation: Tales from the Precipice between theory and practice

Long term access to digital materials relies on active management of these resources. A major challenge for today’s data stewards in managing digital collections is how best to apply the plethora of recommended standards and emerging technologies not only to newly created digital content but to legacy digital data. This paper describes our ongoing activities and methods used in applying standards and best practices in support of the preservation and continuous use of our digital assets. This includes: gathering the history of the data in digital curation profiles, analysis of file formats, storage and management of high resolution master files, ensuring critical preservation metadata is maintained and assessing these digital resources in terms of setting preservation priorities.