Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
Threats to Digital Preservation
and Possible Solutions
Keep constantly in mind in how many things you yourself have witnessed changes
already. The universe is change, life is understanding.
(
Marcus Aurelius
)
We indicated in the Introduction some of the things we need to be worried about. In
this chapter we look at these in more detail, supported by information about what
others worry about.
There are some obvious threats to the preservation of digitally encoded information.
One is what one might call “bit rot” i.e. the deterioration in our ability to read the
bits in which the information is encoded. While this is fundamental, nevertheless
there are an increasing number of ways to overcome this problem, the simplest of
which is replication of the bits i.e. making multiple copies.
One way to think about this is to consider what one might be able to rely on in
the long term.
Within a single organisation, with a continuous supply of adequate funding, the
job of digital preservation is at least feasible. However no-one can be sure of contin-
ued funding, and examples of such continued, and generous, funding are hard if not
impossible to find. Instead the preservation of any piece of digitally encoded infor-
mation almost certainly will rely being passed from one organisation to another.
Thus it depends on a chain of preservation which is only as strong as its weakest
link.
In the following sub-sections we discuss some of the major potential points
of failure in these chains and some of the ways in which these points might be
addressed. Subsequent sections provide more details of the concepts needed to
support these solutions.
