Digital Preservation

Preservation and access to information are central to a library's role and function. In support of that mission, SULAIR has developed a program and set of supporting services in the burgeoning field of digital preservation, to ensure that today's digital resources are around and accessible for tomorrow's scholars.

What is Digital Preservation?

Increasingly the information that supports learning, scholarship, and research – its raw materials and products – is created in and provisioned by digital systems in digital form. The digital preservation field is concerned with maintaining the accessibility of that information over time, and digital preservation services attempt to lower the risk of that information becoming practically inaccessible.

Digital information has many real advantages over information in traditional physical media: it is more easily searched, vast quantities of it can be made available to network-connected users or be stored on users' computers, digital copies generally have higher fidelity than physical media copies and the cost of making them is lower. The increasing ease with which people use and manage digital information often intuitively leads them to expect continued and perhaps increased ease of access to that information over time. Yet significant evidence is mounting that without investing in preservation activity, continuing ease of access is unlikely. The sheer extant quantities and exploding creation rate of digital information combined with the rapid pace of technology change actually makes information in digital form quite fragile over time.

Though this phenomenon may at first seem counterintuitive, most people have experienced events that illustrate the fragility. Anyone who, on a modern computer, has tried to read a 5.25 inch floppy disk, attempted to view an obsolete file format such as WordStar or VisiCalc, suffered a hard-drive failure, or simply tried to locate work produced a few years ago has personal first-hand experience with digital preservation challenges.

Digital Preservation Services

The Stanford Digital Repository
The primary Digital Preservation service offered by DLSS is called the Stanford Digital Repository (or SDR). It is actually a set of services that empower the Libraries to take stewardship over information in digital form, maintaining access to that information over time. The SDR is designed to support the wide variety of digital information being created and used by Stanford communities engaged in learning, scholarship, and research. More information about the SDR is available at: http://lib.stanford.edu/sdr.

LOCKSS
LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is a sister SULAIR initiative focused primarily on building technology and a community to support low-cost, practical preservation of access to publisher-controlled E-journals. More information on LOCKSS may be found here: http://lockss.stanford.edu/