SLA Session Summary: Vicky McCargar: “You Can Kiss Your Assets Goodbye”
On Wednesday morning, June 14, I attended a Special Libraries Association Annual conference session on digital preservation led by Vicky McCargar. Here are my notes.
We need to do more to preserve our digital content. We need to be aware that files degrade and data can be lost. We need to do what we can to protect our data.
Vicky told a gripping story about an organization’s ordeal with electronic archiving. They used a small company’s product. For budgetary reasons, the organization skipped an archive upgrade. The archive company went out of business. The competitors couldn’t handle the data conversion. One of the tech guys at the newspaper took a job elsewhere. The other, sadly, died unexpectedly. The news organization eventually decided they could do nothing about the archive. They ended up losing it all. Luckily, they had been microfilming their product and the microfilm still exists.
Does anyone spot check their archive to make sure the data is holding up okay? It doesn’t take much–just doing some sampling could work.
No vendor offers a product that doees complete preservation. Anyone who claims to offer such a product is, as Vicki said after a pause, “Hopeful.”
One of the major problems with digital archives is that we can never put them away and rest. We can never stop dealing with them.
June 19th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
BTW The New York State Archives is writing into is digitization guidelines that files be checked every six months. Hopefully people will understand the consequences of not keeping a close eye on the files and will check them AND plan for their perservation.