Preserving Digital Materials by Ross Harvey & Jaye Weatherburn

Author:Ross Harvey & Jaye Weatherburn [Harvey, Ross & Weatherburn, Jaye]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Digital Preservation Strategies II

In 2002, I may as well have stood in front of you and set my hair on fire as present any solutions to digital preservation since there were so few.1

William Kilbride’s quote observes that the digital preservation community has grown and matured over the past fifteen years. And just as the community has grown and matured, so have the digital preservation strategies that we use to manage digital materials over time. This chapter examines in more detail the main strategies now applied in digital preservation: digital archaeology and digital forensics, emulation, standard data formats, and migration, with some examples of their success and current application.

Digital Archaeology and Digital Forensics

Digital archaeology encompasses actions taken to recover data that have become inaccessible, where the potential value of the data warrants the time-consuming and expensive techniques of data recovery. Digital forensics has characteristics in common with digital archaeology, as its techniques are based on capturing disk images that are exact copies of information on digital media, including hidden files, and files that record changes to the information. This allows capturing of contextual information that is often vital to demonstrate the authenticity of digital materials. In this book, we make a distinction between these two terms, using digital archaeology as a broader term that encompasses digital forensics. We define digital forensics as a set of defined methods and techniques for rescuing digital data, its practices based on forensics techniques used in law enforcement.

Digital Archaeology

The term digital archaeology refers to “methods and procedures to rescue content from damaged media or from obsolete or damaged hardware and software environments” and involves “specialized techniques to recover bitstreams from media that has been rendered unreadable, either due to physical damage or hardware failure.” It is important to note that digital archaeology is “explicitly an emergency recovery strategy.”2 Special facilities, equipment, and expertise are required, and it is often carried out by data recovery companies.

The UNESCO Guidelines for the Preservation of Digital Heritage caution against relying on digital archaeology, considering it too unreliable and high risk for a current and active preservation program.3 It is expensive, and most materials would not justify the costs of their recovery. But more importantly, it is not reliable. There is no guarantee that digital materials can be recovered, and, even if the data are recovered, there is no certainty that they will be understandable.

Seamus Ross and Ann Gow’s 1999 study Digital Archaeology: Rescuing Neglected and Damaged Data Resources suggests that data recovery should be unnecessary if “good disaster planning” is in place, but this is very rarely the case. Ross and Gow indicate that “with sufficient resources much material that most of us would expect to be lost can be recovered,”4 but we need to note their cautions: seldom are sufficient resources available, and not all material can be recovered. Their detailed report remains essential reading for further information about digital archaeology, and one of their proposals remains true: “More case histories about data loss and rescue need to be collected.

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