DATA CURATION PRESERVATION ISSUES (THREATS TO DIGITAL MATERIALS )

This week we are looking at Data Curation Preservation Issues (Threats to Digital Materials). The Digital Preservation Coalition (2015) in Hurley and Marks (2023) defines digital preservation as the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary. Wisconsin (2004) emphasises that digital curation are the actions needed to maintain and utilise digital data and research results over their entire life cycle. Yakel (2007) in Dobreva and Duff (2015) explains digital curation as the active involvement of information professionals in the management, including preservation of digital data for future use. 

This involves the selection, maintenance, dissemination, preservation and adding value to digital assets. Examples of these activities could include the development of repositories for digital resources, the creation and /or selection of digital assets, creation and management of metadata and management and provision for dissemination and access to digital assets, (Hurley and Marks , 2023). One of the formative documents of most modern approaches to digital preservation is the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model which was developed by a consortium of space agencies to help deal with the problem of access to historical space mission data, (Hurley and Marks, 2023).

Digital curation is a multidisciplinary field, drawing upon the domain knowledge of many disciplines including archival, information, library and computer science. The subject of determining preservation priorities which identifies materials an organisation chooses to put into preserving and which it does not falls into the broader area of digital curation and specifically, appraisal as part of the curation process process, (Wisconsin, 2004). Appraisal as outlined in Jonathan Dorey, Grant Hurley and Beth Knazook's Appraisal Guidance for the Preservation of Research Data, involves the determination of value. Given the many possible choices when identifying the preservation interventions for a specific set of materials an organisation has decided to keep, preservationists may ask how to decide what steps to take or follow. The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) provides a useful concept that aids this kind of process.

According to Hurley and Marcus (2023) one of the threats that is there when preserving digital materials is media obsolescence. This is where media storage become obsolete over time. In some cases it might need reconfiguration so as to make the media work properly. The other threat associated with digital preservation is media degradation. This in simple terms is the decay of media and its contained information over time, (Markus et al., 2018). It is important to remember that most types of digital media have a limited shelf life and that once they are gone it can be difficult or impossible to recover the data. Format obsolescence is yet another threat that is encountered with preserving digital materials. This normally happens when the files in our systems are not intelligible to the applications we use in our day to day computing environment. In agreement Dobreva and Duff (2015) mentions that addressing software with its environment is a challenge when it comes to digital preservation. One of the specific challenges in this domain is the preservation of work specific software.

 Finally we have loss of provenance as a threat to preserving digital materials. If we are dealing with observable data we might be missing information about where, when and how the data was gathered, (Hurley and Marks, 2023). For any data we might be missing information about who created them and whether there are outstanding intellectual property restrictions on the data. 

In conclusion Markus (2018) emphasises that digital preservation is important because loss of research data not only impedes reuse for further research but also research reproducibility, verification of results, provenance and resolving citations and evidence in the long term.

REFERENCES

Hurley, G & Marks, S (2023). Digital preservation of research data. Research Data Management in the Canadian Context.

Dobreva, M & Duff, W.M (2015). The ever changing face of digital curation: introduction to the special issue on digital curation. Springer Science +Business Media, Dordrecht 2015.

Markus, K et al., (2018). Digital preservation and archiving in the NFDI: between established standards, missing awareness and approaches to open questions.

Wisconsin, M (2004). Data curation and digital preservation: a view from the UK (part 1)