DIGITAL PRESERVATION

Our Digital section contains advice, guidance, and additional digital preservation resources that you can use to get started. Most of our work and personal lives are spent on a computer, or tablet, or on our smart-phones. How often do you, or most people in general, save photographs on your phone, or create back-up documents from important files on your computer?

The most important tip for digital preservation is properly backing up your digital items, and this section can assist you in that area.

Preservation Tips

General guidelines detailing how best to preserve digital materials.

Proper Handling of Audio-Visual materials

Decide which documents are most important
Always backup your data!!
Establish a back-up system so your digital (computer) files are saved on a regularly occurring schedule
Always backup your files onto a different form of media
Never use rewritable discs for long-term storage solutions. An external hard drive (with sufficient drive space) is a good solution (as opposed to flash drives or DVD/CD-Rs)
Always make more than one copy of each digital file (at least 3 backup copies), and make sure to store each copy in a different physical location
Use at least 2 different media formats as backups to eliminate any redundancy.
Tagging (labeling) digital materials with descriptive keywords (metadata) will help you to organize your files, and find/retrieve them later. This applies to all digital files, including music, video, or digital photos.
Digital preservation storage solutions today can become obsolete in the future, so it is critical to constantly re-assess your digital storage and preservation strategies
Preservation through migration: Digitization is a highly recommended preservation strategy for analog items such as paper documents or manuscripts, or any format of audio-visual materials, such as photographs, vinyl records, or movie reels.
Digital surrogates (copies) also help create additional access to materials, which can aid in preserving items by limiting the amount that materials are physically handled