After reading the chapter on “Preserving Digital History” in Cohen and Rosenzweig’s Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, I was left questioning why we even bother to preserve anything digitally. While the authors did present many solutions to the vast problems of digital archiving, it all seemed like digital preservation required an expense of time, money, and technical skills that many archivists just don’t have. So why bother with digital preservation?
Because the benefits far outweigh the risks. Digitally preserving materials can not only ensure their longevity while the original material continues to deteriorate, it also provides a much wider range of access to historical materials that an archive just can’t offer. Digital preservation also provides the ability to preserve materials that were born digital and have no way of being archived physically, such as digital history sites and projects. As for the technical skill needed to keep in date with technology and ensure the longevity of the digitized materials, this is not far from the description of what an archivist does currently. In order to maintain the longevity of their archival materials, archivists need to be up to date on best current practices. Best current practices now involves being technologically savvy. The only real problem with digital preservation is expense of money. This is a problem with much of history work already, and besides continually applying for grants or being able to be partner with an organization that can fund the project for the foreseeable future, I don’t have an answer to this problem.
History 717 Student Blog 
These are great points about digital preservation. Another big benefit of preserving digitally is the ability to clear up physical space in archives.
When working in the microfilm lab (which isn’t exactly digital preservation, but sort of a step between), we recycled all of the newspapers we microfilmed.
Massive piles of paper, that would probably fill the entire archives stacks if collected for a couple years, shrunk down to little film reels. The space those film reels take up could shrink down even further if totally digitized.
We get to preserve not only the information in those newspaper articles, but the entire historical aesthetic of the papers. (Which recalls a story Amanda told us where a paper’s articles were digitized but not the ads, which is what one historian was actually interested in.) If a digital or imaging method wasn’t available, so much more would get thrown out because of storage concerns. (So much already does get thrown out because of storage concerns, so hopefully digitization will keep changing that.)
On the other hand, the microfilm lab still exists because the film reels are seen as the best method of preservation, over changing digital storage technologies. So there are still arguments to be made that digital isn’t as trustworthy over the long-term as something physical, which is an issue we’re still working on addressing.
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The issues that Michele mentioned were also the first thing that came to my mind in reading your post. The ability to be unencumbered by limitations of physical space has to be one of the most compelling arguments for digital preservation. The other biggest one that comes to mind is the boon to research historians of having all of this source material accessible (and searchable) via digital means. The disadvantages you’ve described are all things that I had never thought of before taking this class. I had only ever assumed that digitization of historical material was more beneficial to longevity, because data isn’t subject to the same kinds of decay that physical source material can be. I hadn’t given thought to the fact that data is in fact subject to its own decay, which if anything happens more quickly. Many of these problems are solvable, though, as scientists are already working on ways of writing data in forms that are virtually impervious to decay, and that will always remain technologically relevant (see the post I made earlier in the semester about DNA data storage).
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Yes, I had meant to end my post with a statement about the obvious benefit of saving on physical space but I must have gotten over excited and forgot about it while I was writing. But yes both of you bring up very good points about why preserving digitally is in the best interest of archiving, though there might be limitations currently.
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I agree, good points, folks.
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I suppose all of this technology is still too new for us to fully gauge the longevity of digital archives, but after reading the NPR article Paul posted, I wonder if digital data will deteriorate faster than physical objects and documents, at least without serious maintenance. I suppose there’s always the possibility for further upgrades and updates and the recreation of data. I can’t imagine what would replace digital, but I like to visualize an era of telepathic data storage and digital archaeologists.
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