Say Goodbye To The Preservation Backlog
Why do we still think about "Appraisal" as if it was the early 2000's?
This is intuitive to most people, even those with no Digital Archives experience. While recently describing the basic process of building a Digital Archive to general IT stakeholders, an interesting question was raised:
This should hit close to home for many Digital Archivists: a significant portion of their available time is dedicated to understanding pre-ingest digital objects, describing them with metadata and selecting for preservation.
Traditional appraisal guidance for Digital Preservation typically focuses on selecting only the most significant or valuable materials for long-term preservation. In a 2001 paper, Michael Piggott posited a set of "Almost universal truisms" related to appraisal:
Piggott, M. Appraisal - The State of the Art. Australian Society of Archivists Conference and Seminar Papers. May 2001. [Online] http://www.archivists.org.au/sem/misc/piggott.html (Accessed 22/08/05).
It seems reasonable to conclude that the main driver behind these assumptions, which are reflected across key Digital Preservation guidelines, was the technological zeitgeist that contemporary Digital Archivists were obliged to operate in. They key impetus behind many of these concepts can be summarised with one word:
Storage.
Storage was expensive, difficult to procure and manage in large quantities, and posed significant barriers to entry in order to comprise an element of an effective digital archive. As a direct implication of this, Digital Archivists were forced to make concessions on what they were capable of preserving and retaining for the long-term, the motivations are clear:
• to reduce the bulk of material for permanent preservation
• to gain greater intellectual control over the most valuable information contained in the archives
• limit the cost of storing and processing the archive
The issue with this approach is that it's inevitable that potentially valuable content could be either disposed of or put at significant risk. The ideal for any Digital Archivist would be for 'every possible piece of content' to be perfectly understood and preserved, so that there is inherently zero chance that anything that is or could be valuable is put at risk.
And of course, the volume of digital content being created has exploded and keeps growing, which seemingly only exacerbates the issues with the common approach: a very small proportion of content can even be appraised, let alone preserved, leaving a vast build-up of unsecured objects which Digital Archivists have collectively coined: "The Preservation Backlog".
What has changed?
Since much of this common guidance was ideated, not only has the density, accessibility and durability of huge amounts of storage risen to an almost unfathomable level by past-standards, it has also gotten exponentially cheaper to procure, easier to manage and offers unlimited flexibility.
A lack of focus on the specific implementation of an effective appraisal process has stagnated any development on more specialised tools and strategies for Digital Archivists that take advantage of this change. It would be impossible to address the myriad ways the existing appraisal process could be improved with software and revised strategies in one post, but what is abundantly clear is:
- Storage is cheap enough to store significantly more content in a digital archive than in the past
- Compute resources (Cloud, on premise) are cheaper, faster and more simple to leverage than in the past
- Software has the potential to vastly improve the efficiency of Digital Preservation activities than in the past
What does it mean? A New Approach to Appraisal.
Digital Archivists do not have to be as selective with their pre-ingest content as they were in the past.
With the pressure of cost of storage and the stress of the preservation backlog completely taken off of the Archivist, they could be free from the requirement to reduce bulk and empowered to chase what is the truly valuable part of the appraisal process:
Intellectual control over the information
This opens up the potential for a new high-level approach to building Digital Archives which is almost unilaterally improved.
From the old way:
- Accession
- Appraise
- Arrange
- Describe
- Preserve
- Retain
To the new way:
- Accession
- Preserve
- Curate (Appraise, describe, arrange, select)
- Retain
We call this evolved process of appraisal, arrangement and selection "Curation".
By performing the essential actions to secure all of their content pre-ingest, Archivists could keep all of their content secure and remove the debilitating stress of "The Preservation Backlog". Appraisal, arrangement and description can become iterative, cyclical processes that are performed by the Archivist whenever they are able.
This approach recognises that all digital content has potential value, even if it may not be immediately apparent. It also guarantees the security of all of the future value that does or could exist in an Archivists entire collections.
By preserving a broader and deeper range of materials, we can ensure that future generations have access to more rich and diverse digital records.
What tools do Digital Archivists use to action the old approach? Are the current solutions not adequate?
A consistent lack of focus on developing new practices and tools specifically for appraisal, arrangement and selection is a major contributing factor to the ubiquitous preservation backlog. There is a marked absence of dedicated platforms that facilitate these processes compared to the abundance of tools designed to carry out technical preservation actions or to make objects publicly accessible, many of which you may be familiar with.
As a result, Archivists are often forced to build an entirely customised Curation workflow made up of many pieces of software. It's easy to underestimate the incredibly broad and disparate selection of tools and capabilities you might require to appraise, select and organise your collections:
- Capability to view, render or interact with many different kinds of data, even potentially exotic or outdated filetypes.
- - Photo viewers
- - Video viewers
- - Document renderers
- - Spreadsheet software
- - 3D model renderers
- - Metadata visualisers
- Physical storage in which to keep your pre-ingest collections
- An advanced filesystem that enables you to browse your pre-ingest collections and manipulate their structure to create cogent archival-units.
- Advanced search and filtering tools to help you find and sort pre-ingest content.
- Tools to help you move content on to later stages of your workflow
- Tools that allow you to report or otherwise visualise your pre-ingest content
A software environment that is powerful enough to integrate all of these disparate features is incredibly hard to create and even harder to maintain. While this approach could be described as "functional", that is about as strong a plaudit you could award it. It lacks specificity for the workload, involves a huge amount of maintenance and a significant investment from the Archivist into their technical skillsets. That's not even to mention the implicit difficulties in having access to those tools in the right place at the right time.
Appraising, Arranging and Selecting Digital Content in 2023: Curate.
Of course, the best way to prove this approach to Digital Preservation is to implement it. We believe this should begin with and always return to the development of better tools for Archivists.
Our software platform, Curate, is the first that is designed specifically to implement this revolutionary approach to digital preservation and addresses many of the key challenges we have identified with the current state the appraisal process and the implications it has on a wider Digital Preservation workflow:
From the tools to appraise and understand your content, the capability to enrich it with descriptive metadata, integration with many additional preservation tools, full arrangement functionality, easy access to cheap Archival-quality storage and a unified selection of options to view and interact with your collections, Curate is the only platform that wraps every tool you need to start building robust Digital Archives into a modern and performant user experience.
Try it out today to discover how simple it can be to secure your digital objects.
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