Thinking Digital Preservation: for the serious, intelligent, digital preserver

This book will provide the readers with the mental tools to enable them to think their way through challenges concerning digital preservation. It will show the readers how to think about and understand digital preservation in a way that will enable them to cope with whatever preservation challenges are presented, now and in the future. The aim is to enable the readers, when presented with digitally encoded information which must be preserved, to be able to evaluate proposed solutions or, evaluate and choose between options if they wish to implement a solution themselves. Hence the first part of the title “Thinking Digital Preservation”. The part of the title which says “for the serious, intelligent digital preserver” is a hint that some of the content of this book may be thought to be too detailed and perhaps a little hard. But consider a motor mechanic working on your family’s car. You would be worried if they did not know the details of how a car works including details of the engine and brakes. Similarly, one would not wish to fly in a plane for which the designer did not have detailed knowledge of the appropriate topics which require working diligently through, and mastering, very hard mathematical and engineering techniques. Even the pilot will need to know a fair amount about the fundamentals of flight in order to deal with emergencies. With these thoughts in mind, consider someone who is responsible for preserving your valuable digital information. Surely you would be very concerned if that person said: “I cannot be bothered to understand the details, they are too difficult, so I only look at the easy stuff”. Surely you would be outraged and would seek someone else to undertake the preservation. You would be right to react in that way. Hence if readers claim to be, or wish to claim to be, serious, intelligent, digital preservers, they must put in the effort to read and understand this book.