Book Review: The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation

There is a lot of anxiety around the digital and its differences, often assumed rather than thoroughly understood. Plenty of myths spun around it have created colossal obstacles for archivists, librarians, and other cultural heritage professionals who often default to the analog when trying to cope with the avalance of culturally significant digital objects in need of preservation and who derive criticism for having paper minds (Cook, 1994). Yet, after half a century of work= with digital materials, libraries and archives have seen little guidance in best practices of digital preservation. Such a guide is precisely what Trevor Owen, Head of Digital Content Management at the Library of Congress, offers in The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation (2018). However, in his book, one finds neither workflows nor detailed recommendations, nor model designs of digital preservation programs at mock cultural heritage institutions. Instead, his slim volume dissolves the mythology of digital preservation and assembles a way of thinking about digital objects as a conceptual step in working out practical solutions that fit individual circumstances.

As Owens shares, the ‘craft’ emphasis in the book emerged in response to the ‘over-diagramification’ of digital preservation (80). So, instead of more – or better – diagrams, he proposes a constant dialog with archival traditions. In the spirit of theoretical principles to cement the very enterprise of digital preservation, he formulates sixteen ‘axioms’ that cumulatively disabuse the archivists of the idea that a technical solution might one day appear to rescue them, that the task of digital preservation may once be marked as completed, that backing-up and copying will suffice, or that a lone arranger independent of a cultural heritage institution might succeed on this resource-demanding path. Most digital objects will never be saved, points out Owens and encourages practitioners to ‘embrace the archival sliver’ (14).

To help archivists decide what in the digital realm qualifies for long-term preservation, Owens elaborates on the lineage of digital preservation (Chapter 1), on digital objects (Chapter 2), and on challenges of the operation (Chapter 3) as he reiterates the wisdom of the profession – ‘to inexpensively ensure the longevity of the information stored on the object’ (29). Digital media has a very short lifecycle, reminds us Owens, so a digital preservationist should always think about ‘how to move content forward’, not how to maintain the medium (58) unless some potentially significant historical traces are tucked away in digital copies and, therefore, merit preservation.

The ‘craft’ part of the book addresses such topics as collection development and preservation intent; formats and copies; arrangement and description; and multimodal access. Starting with the challenges of preserving World of Warcrafts, a massively multiplayer online game in which much of the experience depends on the players connected to the server, Owens lines up a series of examples to demonstrate that there is no immanent significance attached to any digital object: what counts as significant depends on the context and sometimes lies outside the object itself, so the task of preservation is to document the object in use in its original context. Noting the rapid development of software and, consequently, rapid obsolescence of many digital formats, the author offers a detailed discussion of making, managing, and checking digital copies for fixity in order to ensure their security and to prevent data corruption, damage, or deletion, incidents all sadly familiar to experts and the lay alike. This, by far, is the most technical section of the book as the narrative delves into specialized recommendations for encryption, format migration and sustainability, for which Owens recommends using such formats as PDF, MP3, JPEG, or GIF since their popularity is likely to ensure that their developers will create services and tools to assist both individuals and organizations should the formats become risky.

Relating preservation challenges of memes, 4chan imageboard, StoryCorps.me, and a few other projects, Owens emphasizes the importance of arrangement and description as a primary means by which collections, digital and otherwise, become discoverable and legible to future users and suggests relying on the archival tradition with its vast knowledge of how to process a wide range of formats, at scale, respecting the original order. Digital, he insists, is not ‘a whole other universe of objects and experience’; instead, it participates in the continuity of collecting traditions and does not benefit from an artificial separation from those traditions on the ground of its “digitality” (131). Finally, turning to access to digital materials, Owens suggests providing ‘wholesale bulk access’ to empower a range of future uses, keeping in mind the time factor – the sooner access is provided, the sooner the archivist receives feedback on what makes sense to users.

Importantly, while he prioritizes access, Owens does not advocate opening everything and identifies multiple legal constraints that apply to digital materials, including copyright, privacy, and respect for cultural norms. Moreover, he notes that the very groups whose digital materials archivists collect as valuable cultural records might be targeted by those who wish to suppress their activities or retaliate against the group members, and the archival neglect of data privacy may inflict real harm.

Concluding the book, Owens encourages digital preservation enthusiasts to look in both directions: to the past on which to build and to the future for which to plan. In the latter, he discerns plenty of significant changes: from new user interfaces and storage capacities to climate change and subsequent floods that threaten to put many cultural heritage institutions under water. Yet, he does not darken the palette to close with a resonant doom-and-gloom message. To the contrary, Owens ends on a positive note, borrowing from Martha Anderson, former managing director of the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, a metaphor of a relay race that projects digital preservation as a series of hand-offs in a chain of memory (199-200).

Written in a very accessible style that accommodates the generally curious as well as seasoned professionals, the book avoids jargon and draws on multiple examples. As it surveysing a vast territory where digital preservation is needed, it simultaneouly extends an invitation to join the ongoing efforts to preserve diverse digital cultural heritage. Readers who would like concrete, step-by-step instructions on how to work with specific digital objects may find plenty of advice in related publications, for instance, in The No-nonsense Guide to Born-digital Content by Ryan and Sampon (2018) or Digital Preservation Essentials by O’Meara and Stratton (2016) or Practical Digital Preservation: A How-to Guide for Organizations of Any Size by Brown (2013). Yet, they will still need to open Owens’ book to get a clear view of why to proceed the way they hope to.