Challenges in Maintaining Digital Formats

Saving the Digital Record: Harvard Library Safeguards Material Stored in Obsolete Formats

ScienceBlog.com | May 9, 2015


When digital becomes dinosaur, most people simply get inconvenienced. But librarians and archivists get seriously concerned.
Ensuring that digital content — whether it’s a short story by John Updike or a very rare audio recording of a vanished Native American language — lives on past its initial platform is one of the most pressing issues in preservation science. Harvard is one of a handful of cultural institutions in the first wave of adopting a technology and process to preserve its digital content.
Libraries and archives at Harvard hold thousands of unique items across hundreds of digital formats, including aging technology such as CDs, floppy disks, tapes, and cassettes. To retrieve content prior to total obsolescence or decay of digital formats, librarians are using digital forensic software commonly employed by the police or the FBI to solve crimes, which enables them to identify content noninvasively and migrate it to a more stable platform.

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