A Digital Decade: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going in Digital Preservation?

Abstract

There has been measurable progress in the digital preservation community since the seminal work Preserving Digital Information: Final Report and Recommendations was published by the commission of the Commission on Preservation and Access and RLG more than a decade ago. Those concerned about digital preservation in 1996 did not have the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) standard to frame the development and discussion of digital preservation developments; or a set of attributes of trusted digital repository to delineate the organizational context for digital preservation; or a data dictionary for preservation metadata; or the concept of institutional repositories made real by a range of software options. All of these developments have emerged within the past decade. Today, we have conferences that are entirely devoted to digital preservation (e.g., the International Preservation (iPres)) conference and peer-reviewed journals for digital preservation, (e.g., The International Journal of Digital Curation). One can follow the maturation of the digital preservation community in a decade of RLG DigiNews articles.