Seeing the whole elephant: an integrated approach to managing preservation

Today’s hybrid collections demand new ways of thinking about preservation. There is a need for an integrated approach combining the current largely disparate fields of digital and physical preservation, to inform prioritisation of information resources requiring preservation attention, assist in shaping integrated workflows, and enable sharing of strategies across physical and digital formats. This paper explores an integrated approach through the analogy of the traditional Indian story of the six blind men and the elephant. It investigates some preventive and copying strategies as examples of approaches that apply these common principles across digital and physical formats, and concludes with observations on the benefits of seeing the whole preservation elephant.