Happy World Digital Preservation Day! The theme for this year is Why Preserve?
Why do we Preserve?
From the earliest evidence of human activity, humans have sought to preserve. This impulse ranges from the preservation of cultural meaning through cave paintings and petroglyphs, to the use of clay tokens for accounting and administration, to the later development of cuneiform as the earliest known writing system. All shared a common purpose: to store and communicate information outside limits of a human mind - interpretable long after their creators’ deaths.
Digital information is the modern heir to this long lineage of human preservation, and it is incumbent upon us to approach it with the same care and foresight as our ancestors did. What we preserve is far more than a storage medium - hard-drives, servers, or cloud platforms - or the specific file formats we use, such as Microsoft Word documents or PDFs. At its core, what endures are the ideas, insights, knowledge, and creative expression encoded within these digital forms - the thoughts, intentions, and imagination of the human mind, preserved so that future generations can encounter, interpret, and be inspired by them. Just as cave paintings, clay tokens, and cuneiform carried meaning across millennia, today’s digital artifacts hold the potential to communicate, inspire, and bear witness to our time long into the future. Preserving them is not merely a technical task; it is an ethical, social, and cultural responsibility to safeguard the intellectual and cultural legacy of humanity.
Just as our ancestors carefully chose which marks, objects, or records to leave behind, we must be thoughtful and considerate about what digital traces we protect. Unlike physical artifacts, digital information is fragile in ways our predecessors could not have imagined: it is subject to obsolescence, corruption, and the pace of technological change. Yet, it offers unprecedented opportunities for longevity, through replication and migration, as well as through careful metadata documentation, ensuring that meaning and context endure even as technologies evolve. Digital preservation is always ongoing and never a finished task; materials are never preserved, rather they are always in the process of being preserved. The key to digital preservation is active stewardship over time.
Recent Digital Preservation Activities at The Library of Trinity College Dublin
We are actively involved in numerous digital preservation activities. In recent years we have acquired archival collections of global significance which contain born-digital artefacts, engaged in e-mail preservation, preserved both parts of the University website and project-based websites through web archiving; and are currently undertaking a pilot programme with a digital preservation system.
E-Mail Preservation
E-Mail is one of the most common forms of communication today. They document conversations, decisions, and relationships and will be essential source material for future researchers seeking to understand our world. To enable their future study requires us to begin preserving them now. We have acquired numerous e-mail accounts and preserving them often requires carefully migrating them to formats that are more sustainable over the long-term, creating multiple copies, and ensuring we can demonstrate the integrity and authenticity of what we are preserving. We also need to be conscious of privacy concerns given the sensitive content that is often contained within e-mails. As a result, most emails we are preserving are not yet available to researchers but ensuring that they can be available in the future necessitates us preserving them today to make future discovery and access possible.
Web Archiving
Websites are a key source for documenting life in our digital age. They can capture how institutions such as Trinity College, Dublin present themselves to the world, providing future researchers with evidence of how they expressed their identity. Websites can also be used to present the outputs of academic projects that need to be sustained beyond their funding cycle. Archiving them can preserve the context, legacy, and intellectual impact, of projects long after their conclusion. However, anyone who has tried to revisit an old website link knows how often the content is no longer accessible. The web is constantly changing, with content created and then deleted in quick succession, essential updates not being funded, or hosting costs not being available, ensuring that content will not be available in the future. Without active preservation, future researchers will be faced with digital gaps instead of the stories and content these records hold. To combat this, the Library has engaged in web archiving, a series of steps to allow future users to interact with a website as it looked on the day it was archived and when the website may no longer be available on the live web. We have captures of some of the Library website and some of the University’s website. We have also helped to sustain project websites which were no longer being actively managed. We plan on building on this work in the coming year, capturing more content and ensuring that more of our digital presence can be preserved for the future, while also providing access to some content.
Pilot Programme
We have also recently embarked on a pilot programme in partnership with the digital preservation company Preservica. This initiative will help us refine our technical requirements, ensuring that our future approach is aligned with the diverse needs of stakeholders across the University. The lessons learned will inform future planning, helping us establish a sustainable framework for safeguarding the University’s growing body of digital heritage. The pilot will also provide a valuable opportunity to develop and test new workflows for managing digital content, and, for the first time, to provide secure access to born-digital material. This is a significant development for the Library, and we will have more exciting digital preservation announcements over the next year!