Rough Start For Digital Preservation

How hard will it be to preserve today’s digital record for tomorrow’s historians, researchers, and students? Judging by the preliminary results of some attempts to save for the distant future the September 11 Digital Archive[1] (a project I co-directed), it won’t be easy. While there are some bright spots to the reports in D-Lib Magazine last month[2] on the efforts of four groups to “ingest” (or digitally accession) the thousands of files from the 9/11 collection, the overall picture is a little bit sobering. And this is a fairly well-curated (though by no means perfect) collection. Just imagine what ingesting a messy digital collection, e.g., the hard drive of your average professor, would entail. Here are some of the important lessons from these early digital preservation attempts, as I see it.