Happy New Year everyone!

Preserving scholarly works, history of the world, countries all the way down to individual institutions has been happening for a very long time in very different ways. The decision to preserve something for the long haul always lags the initial creation of content. Generally, the value of the content and the intent to preserve it is based on the impact of the content, which takes some time. Libraries are the institutions that make decisions on what to preserve, how to preserve and how to make them available. This is a lot of hard work on the part often led by the special collections and archives in the libraries.

But, in the last 20 to 25 years, things have changed dramatically thanks to the internet, advances in technologies and predominantly the content are born-digital. And since the wide adoption of various social media, digital content has exploded exponentially. This applies to written text, audio as well as videos. These advances have democratized the content creation and distribution like never before, which, like everything else, has its positives and negatives. Of course the advanced technology allows for easy preservation and generally all content creators take advantage and preserve pretty much everything they create, although often not up to the standards that guarantee long-term preservation which libraries need to meet. This poses enormous challenges to the libraries and there has been some excellent work in this area led by Library of Congress and you can read about it in detail here. I just want to touch on some of the technical aspects of it here.

(more…)