We have a digital preservation initiative (in its infancy) to establish a Trusted Digital Repository (TDR) for our digital resources and data. If you’re not familiar with these terms check out these links:

• http://www.library.cornell.edu/iris/tutorial/dpm/eng_index.html
• http://www.rlg.org/longterm/
• http://www.rlg.org/longterm/attributes01.pdf

Essentially its about ensuring that your grandchildren who have continued on in the museum-profession family business can access and use your life’s work. As a simple example, if you have all your images in jpeg format right now, you convert them to another new and exciting format before the ability to read and use jpegs goes away. Digital Preservation is a combination of storage management, data management, platforms, policies, procedures and processes that ensure you can and will be able to access and use your data for generations. That’s the theory.

But don’t listen to anyone who claims they will sell you an application that can do it – its not that simple. No one is claiming to have solved this problem satisfactorily (that we know about) and lots of very smart people are working on it. Its possible that military or government organizations have, but they’re not letting on.

A TDR is a ‘thing’ that you can trust to be usable in years to come. But part of the problem is that we don’t exactly know what it looks like and when you don’t know what the result looks like, its hard to know when you get there. Another part of the problem is the driving force behind the initiative.

Consider Y2K, a classic example of Un-Trusted Digital Repositories. There was a specific date (and time) when any digital repository that stored dates may or may or not fail. It was a galvanizing event and much of the technology world went through a digital preservation initiative to ensure what they had would work on Jan 1st, 2000.

We don’t have such a potentially catastrophic event behind this initiative. But while many people are devoting time to solve it, you know there are conferences, (iPRES), it seems to me that many of us are already doing it.

Maybe I don’t get it – which has happened on enough occasions to make it entirely possible – but any time you migrate from an old server to a new server, upgrade your database version, switch from a flat website to a data driven website or upgrade your office applications, you’re increasing the life expectancy of thoses digital resources. Will JPEGs or SQL ever go away? With the installed base that these formats enjoy, unlikely. Will Microsoft stop supporting the Microsoft Word 2000 application? That would be a yes, but last time I checked my latest version of MS Office, I could read and write Word 6.0/95 for Windows.

Piecemeal upgrades and migrations are not the most elegant of solutions, but methinks a fully certified TDR won’t be either.