This notebook is a place to record useful tidbits of information about digital preservation. The Wikipedia page on Digital Preservation provides quite a good overview of the field, but this notebook intends to dig a little deeper.

Roughly speaking, the technical side of digital preservation can be broken down into two parts:

• Preserving the bytes.
• Preserving access to the digital objects those bytes describe.

Most of this notebook deals with the latter issue, i.e. with how to preserve the meaning of digital objects so that they remain accessible over time. Of course, all of that work is based on the assumption that we can keep the actual binary data safe from bit-rot, and so the first section will look at that issue.

See also items tagged as digital preservation