Assessing File Format Risk for Born-Digital Preservation Planning

Assessing File Format Risk for Born-Digital Preservation Planning

This post originally appeared on the
Smithsonian Institution Archives’ blog.
Melissa Anderson’s internship was part of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives’ 50th Anniversary Internship program, with funding provided by the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian National Board.
When I entered the MLIS program at the University of Alabama
School of Library and Information Studies
in 2018 and became interested in digital libraries, I was surprised to learn that the information we create and store digitally is just as, and in some cases even more, fragile than unstable media or paper. Physical damage, deterioration of digital storage media, and the technological complexity and dependency of electronic records make them uniquely vulnerable to loss,
corruption
, and alteration. As keepers of records with historical, cultural, and legal value, archival repositories have a responsibility to identify at-risk digital objects and take preemptive action to preserve them in a format that is accessible to the broadest possible public for the
longest possible time
. As a Smithsonian Libraries and Archives 50th Anniversary intern in born-digital collections, I’m learning how to do just that.
At present,
more than half of the Smithsonian Institution Archives’ annual accessions
contain born-digital materials, most of which are acquired in mixed collections alongside print and analog media. To document and serve the Institution, the Archives collects documents, spreadsheets, images, audiovisual (AV) material, email, databases, designs, data sets, software, websites, and social media content. These electronic records span more than 40 years and are stored in a variety of media formats, some of which require urgent preservation to avoid information loss.
Gif slideshow of Digital Collections information.
The Archives’ employs a multi-pronged
born-digital preservation strategy
that follows professional standards and best practices including the
OAIS Reference Model
and
trustworthy digital repositories
. The three prongs are: bit-level preservation, migration of at-risk files to stable preservation formats, and emulation for access to records locked in obsolete formats. The first strategy creates an exact copy of a file’s content information and data structure and is applied to all digital objects on accession. Having two (or more) identical copies of every file and storing them in different locations mitigates the risk of loss due to media, system, or human failure and disasters like
fire
and
flooding
, but possession does not automatically equal access. Our ability to even open and view a file during processing depends on hardware and software that can read and render it.
Obsolescence affects both the machines and the software we use to create, store, and access digital files. Advancements in power, speed, efficiency, and cost lead to
rapid obsolescence of computer hardware
. Th…