Durable Digital Objects Rather Than Digital Preservation

Long-term digital preservation is not the best available objective. Instead, what information producers and consumers almost surely want is a universe of durable digital objects—documents and programs that will be as accessible and useful a century from now as they are today. Given the will, we could implement and deploy a practical and pleasing durability infrastructure within two years. Tools for daily work can embed packaging for durability without much burdening their users. Moving responsibility for durability from archival employees to information producers would also avoid burdening repositories with keeping up with Internet scale. An engineering prescription is available. Research libraries’ and archives’ slow advance towards practical preservation of digital content is remarkable to outsiders. Why does their progress seem stalled? Ineffective collaboration across disciplinary boundaries has surely been a major impediment. We speculate about cultural reasons for this situation and warn about possible marginalization of research librarianship as a profession.

Durable Digital Objects Rather Than Digital Preservation

Long-term digital preservation is not the best available objective. Instead, what information producers and consumers almost surely want is a universe of durable digital objects—documents and programs that are as accessible and useful a century from now as they are today. Given the will, we could implement and deploy a practical and pleasing durability infrastructure within two years. Tools for daily work can embed packaging for durability without much burdening their users. Moving responsibility for durability from archival employees to information producers also avoids burdening repositories with keeping up with Internet scale. An engineering prescription is available. Research libraries’ and archives’ slow advance towards practical preservation of digital content is remarkable to outsiders. Why is their progress stalled? Ineffective collaboration across disciplinary boundaries has surely been a major impediment. We speculate about cultural reasons for this situation and warn about possible marginalization of research librarianship as a profession.

Long-Term Preservation of Digital Records, Part I: A Theoretical Basis

The Information Revolution is making preservation of digital records an urgent issue. Archivists have grappled with the question of how to achieve this for about 15 years. We focus on limitations to preservation, identifying precisely what can be preserved and what cannot. Our answer comes from the philosophical theory of knowledge, especially its discussion about the limits of what can be communicated. Philosophers have taught that answers to critical questions have been obscured by "failure to understand the logic of our language". We can clarify difficulties by paying extremely close attention to the meaning of words such as 'knowledge', 'information', 'the original', and 'dynamic'. What is valuable in transmitted and stored messages, and what should be preserved, is an abstraction, the pattern inherent in each transmitted and stored digital record. This answer has, in fact, been lurking just below the surface of archival literature. To make progress, archivists must collaborate with software engineers. Understanding perspectives across disciplinary boundaries will be needed.

Preserving Dynamic Digital Records

Preserving a dynamic record encounters no problem in principle beyond those for preserving other digital records. The purpose of the current chapter is to show this. Because confusion about ‘dynamic’ occurs even among preservation experts, an exacting analysis is merited. We provide this by using analytic methodology whose best examples are found in early 20th century philosophy. (This was prepared responsive to a 2005 request for a chapter in an online DCC book. For reasons unknown to the author, it never appeared.)

Principles for Digital Preservation

Published difficulties with long-term digital preservation prove to be largely confusions with language. Similar difficulties were addressed in early twentieth-century philosophy. We describe prominent confusions, show how to clarify the issues, and summarize a ‘Trustworthy Digital Object (TDO)’ method that solves all the technical challenges described in the literature. Other TDO reports provide detailed design and analysis of the TDO method. A purpose of the current article is to invite searching public criticism before anyone invests significant resources in creating preservation data objects.

Trustworthy 100-Year Digital Objects: Syntax and Semantics--Tension Between Facts and Values

Prior Trustworthy 100-Year Digital Object articles describe a method for preserving digitally represented information. Trustworthy Digital Object (TDO) representation and packaging makes any digital content reliably meaningful to consumers, no matter how distant these are in time, in space, and in social affiliation from their information sources. The current article focuses on digital document authenticity and on evidence a consumer can use to decide whether to trust the content. Such considerations are necessarily epistemological. Arguing the issues must start by conveying as unambiguously as possible what we mean by words like ‘authenticity’ and ‘evidence’ and by distinguishing between statements that are ‘objective’ and those that are ‘subjective’. Our analysis applies Wittgenstein’s teaching to pictorial models of digital and conventional communication. This analysis leads us to identify an ethical imperative for digital preservation, and to suggest that the TDO method defines a quality standard against which any method of digital preservation should be judged.

Preserving Digital Records: A Method Guided by Scientific Philosophy

Preserving digital information has received steadily increasing attention since 1995. However there has been little substantial progress towards resolving the key technical challenges: first, ensuring the future ability to use producer’s information with computers whose design cannot today be known; and second, creating durable evidence so that each future user can prudently decide whether to trust saved information. We outline a solution to these challenges—a solution that we call the Trustworthy Digital Object (TDO) method. TDOs provide reliable packaging for any type of digital object, no matter how distant its eventual recipients are in time, space, and organizational affiliation from the information sources. Each preserved object carries its own provenance audit trail. Information producers can prepare documents for archiving without help or permission from anyone. Archivists can add metadata without communicating with producers. Consumers can test the authenticity of preserved documents without human assistance. Deep analyses and searching peer critiques are important as preludes to implementation and deployment of any proposed digital preservation solution. Early twentieth-century philosophy and pictorial models help clarify dilemmas expressed in Archivaria articles and elsewhere. Our analysis leads us to suggest that the TDO method achieves technical quality against which any method of digital preservation should be judged.

Preserving Dynamic Digital Resources

Most articles about digital preservation come from the cultural heritage community. The needs they express will expand to those of businesses wanting safeguards against diverse frauds, attorneys arguing cases based on the probative value of digital documents, and our own dependencies on personal medical records. The U.S. NDIIPP expresses urgency for preserving authentic digital works. We know how to accomplish this reliably for every kind of information, with packaging that will seem convenient to all kinds of user. Among the digital record types that we might want to preserve, “dynamic records” are thought to need extra attention because some digital heritage experts apparently believe they pose unique challenges. The nature of these concerns suggests review of what it means for a record to be dynamic and how dynamic records can be preserved. Because confusion about ‘dynamic’ occurs even among preservation experts, an exacting analysis is merited. We provide this by using methodology whose best examples are found in early 20th century philosophy. For a work to be eligible for copyright protection, it must be fixed—written in a stable representation. Whenever a computing system saves a record copy, or shares one with a remote user, this is a stable version. Since dynamic digital objects introduce no technical problem beyond those already solved for stable documents, it is unnecessary to prescribe any new best practices for preserving them.

Long-Term Preservation of Digital Records, Part II: A Technical Solution

Part I of this review suggests that the proper entities for archival attention are patterns inherent in transmitted and stored messages. Most digital archival repository technology—what private sector enterprises call Content Management (CM) technology—has been thoroughly understood and widely deployed for more than a decade. This technology is not adequate for long-term digital preservation because it includes no mechanisms for reliably assuring authenticity and intelligibility of digital documents for 50 years or longer. CM provides for near-term preservation without handling long-term preservation, which must overcome risks associated with technological obsolescence and fading human memory. We show how to mitigate these risks. Implementing software would be a small addition to widely deployed CM offerings. We recall the essential core of archival principles analyzed by other authors. We then sketch how our long-term preservation solution, devised for preserving cultural and scholarly digital documents, can be implemented to conform to these archivists' principles for business records. It sketches our Trustworthy Digital Object architecture and its design core sufficiently to show how archivists can participate in managing digital repositories that conform and are attuned to the particular needs of any archival institution. It omits technical details of little interest to records custodians.