Benign Neglect: Developing Life Rafts for Digital Content

In his keynote speech at the Archiving 2009 Conference in Arlington, Virginia, Clifford Lynch called for the development of a benign neglect model for digital preservation, one in which as much content as possible is stored in whatever manner available in hopes of there someday being enough resources to more properly preserve it. This is an acknowledgment of current resource limitations relative to the burgeoning quantities of digital content that need to be preserved. We need low cost, scalable methods to store and preserve materials. Over the past few years, a tremendous amount of time and energy has, sensibly, been devoted to developing standards and methods for best practices. However, a short survey of some of the leading efforts clarifies for even the casual observer that implementation of the proposed standards is beyond many of those who are creating or hosting digital content, particularly because of restrictions on acceptable formats, requirements for extensive metadata in specific XML encodings, need for programmers for implementation, costs for participation, or simply a lack of a clear set of steps for the uninitiated to follow (examples include: Planets, PREMIS, DCC, CASPAR, iRods, Sound Directions, HathiTrust). (1) The deluge of digital content coupled with the lack of funding for digital preservation and exacerbated by the expanding variety of formats, makes the application of extensive standards and extraordinary techniques beyond the reach of the majority. Given the current circumstances, Lynch says, either we can seek perfection and store very little, or we can be sloppy and preserve more, discarding what is simply intractable. (2) In contrast, other leaders of the digital preservation movement have been stating for years that benign neglect is not a workable solution for digital materials. Eric Van de Velde, director of Caltech's Library Information Technology Group, stated that the "digital archive must be actively managed." (3) Tom Cramer of Stanford University agrees: "Benign neglect doesn't work for digital objects. Preservation requires active, managed care." (4) The Digital Preservation Europe website argues that benign neglect of digital content "is almost a guarantee that it will be inaccessible in the future." (5) Abby Smith goes so far as to say that "neglect of digital data is a death sentence." (6) Arguments to support this statement are primarily those of media or data carrier storage fragility and obsolescence of hardware, software, and format. However, the impact of these arguments can be reduced to a manageable nightmare. By removing as much as possible of the intermediate systems, storing open-source code for the software and operating system needed for access to the digitized content, and locating archival content directly on the file system itself, we reduce the problems to primarily that of format obsolescence. This approach will enable us to forge ahead in the face of our lack of resources and our rather desperate need for rapid, cheap, and pragmatic solutions. Current long-term preservation archives operating within the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model assume that producers can meet the requirements of ingest. (7) However, the amount of content that needs to be deposited into archives and the expanding variety of formats and genres that are unsupported, are overwhelming the ability of depositors to prepare content for preservation. Andrea Goethals of Harvard proposed that we revisit assumptions of producer ability to prepare content for deposit in accordance with the current best practices. (8) For those producers of content who are not able to meet the requirements of ingest, or who do not have access to an OAIS archive provider, what are the options? With the recent downturn in the economy, the availability of staff and the funding for the support of digital libraries has no doubt left many collections at risk of abandonment. Is there a method for preparation of content for long-term storage that is within the reach of existing staff with few technical skills? …