Preservation through the power of many
Talk at the PERICLES Conference, London, Nov 2016.
Humanity continues to generate a digital legacy of ever increasing size, complexity and value. This statement will come as no surprise to those reading this abstract. But the number of people with formal training or responsibility for long-term safekeeping and access to this digital legacy are massively outnumbered by those who are creating this content. The gap is huge: more than a thousand to one. The same is true for budgets: for every pound spent generating content, only one penny is spent on preservation and making that content available and usable in the future. Whilst the digital preservation community continues to make great strides in preservation tools, techniques, standards and best practice, this is in itself not enough. I will argue that preservation needs to be pushed upstream into the world of content creation. This is where the capacity and budgets really lie. Yet outside of memory institutions, the term digital preservation is little used, the benefits are not well understood, and preservation techniques are not put into practice. A change is required. I will argue that preservation needs to be embedded in the day-to-day 'business' of content creators. But success will depend on achieving three things: preservation providing immediate business benefits to content creators; lowering costs of daily business operations; and being seamlessly integrated and automated into business environments. I will argue that achieving this, even in small measures, will in turn will make life significantly easier for those down stream who take on the task of sustaining this content in the long term, for example through better metadata, easier to handle formats, and simpler transfer of content and responsibilities. A change of approach and mindset is needed, but the rewards are surely there - we just need to harness the power of many.