Accessible Preservation

Developing an inclusive strategy for management and preservation of born-digital assets

Many legacy born-digital collections were created with research and access in mind, responding to events ‘of the moment’, using outdated technological standards, or retaining only lower quality access representations, not ideal for longer-term digital preservation. Increasingly, institutional practices in Universities, Libraries, and other Commercial organisations, are shaped by the desire to save space, and to improve shareability in digital workspaces. Institutional moves towards digital submission procedures, e.g. university e-theses, calls only for access copies, and can inadvertently encourage compression, encryption, hyperlinked content, and web-optimisation, as depositors mitigate upload constraints or rights management in the digital environment.

Although we can recommend ideals around high quality deposits for preservation going forward, how do we address the challenges of our pre-existing digital collections and early legacy work? And if we choose to exclude collections based on the unavailability of appropriate preservation originals, do we risk creating inequalities that unintentionally bias our collections in the long-term, against lower-budget, often arts and humanities, and community research?

This is the beginning of a year-long project to define the practical decisions necessary to facilitate inclusive preservation of born-digital assets: What are the challenges of our pre-existing digital collections and early legacy work? To what extent is it possible to ‘make do and mend’ our born digital collections? What might a records management strategy look like for these?