Wishart floppy disks

Digital preservation

Digital archives are in some respects more fragile than physical archives due to rapidly changing technology and the constant threat of obsolescence of the software and hardware upon which they are so reliant.

Digital archives need to be actively managed in order to enable them to be accessed and re-used over the long term.

For information about how best to create and manage digital files created by you or your organisation, visit our Managing your digital files page.

Our approach

We are in the process of establishing a digital archive to curate the digital material that we collect. This material includes both the born digital archives that are donated or deposited with us and digital surrogates created from the physical documents that we hold.

Digital material will be managed in an archive based on the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model.

A migration-based approach to digital preservation will be adopted, with an emphasis on maintaining the significant properties of the digital data and ensuring the information remains accessible to our users both now and into the future.

Current progress

Establishing an OAIS compliant digital archive takes time.

Our current focus is to ensure that the digital data in our care is moved over to our preservation file store and backed up.

The integrity of this data is checked regularly to ensure that the files remain as they were when deposited with us.

Scoping work looking at digital preservation requirements is underway and will help inform our approach and the adoption of systems and software.

Digital Archiving blog

The sustainability of a digital preservation blog...

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 15:58:00 +0000

Goodbye and thanks

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 11:31:00 +0000

Testing manual normalisation workflows in Archivematica

Thu, 08 Nov 2018 11:24:00 +0000

Digital Preservation Coalition

We are an associate member of the Digital Preservation Coalition.

Digital Preservation Coalition logo