Practical Preservation
for Everyone
Why Digital Preservation Matters to you
and your community

November 20, 2015
Flagstaff, AZ

Presented by
Sam Dyal and Matthew Harp

© Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Digital Preservation

"Wikimedia Foundation Servers-8055 08" by Victorgrigas - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-

Image from Mars taken by the Viking 2 lander

How?
•
•
•
•
•

Obsolescence (ability to access)
Damage
User errors
Equipment malfunctions
Cyber attacks or virus

It can Happen to You…
and Me

Take Action
Identify, Organize, and Describe - avoid
loss
Convert - fight obsolescence
Be secure - prevent attacks, damage
Back up Plan - save copies in multiple
places

Identify

Why Preservation
digitalpreservation.gov/multimedia/videos/personalarchiv

Main Archive

Organize

Describe

Title

Creator

Dates Location Subjects

The Usual Suspects

Filenames

IMG_2611.jpg

20100228_HarpMatt.jpg
(yyyymmdd_LastFirst.ext)

#@$ !.^
Feb 21’ Matt Harp’s.ext
07.12 MH 1.ext
20120712 subject/title 4.ext

20120701_HarpMatt_ALA_001.jpg
(yyyymmdd_Name_Place.ext)

separate_with-dashes_004.ext

Be Consistent
File Name

Meaning

20151119_AZ-C-P-N_01.ppt

YYYYMMDD_location-Event-Type_Version

Guide
Abbreviation

Meaning

AZ

Arizona

C

Conference

P

Presentations

N

Notes

Transfer and Convert

accessible sharable
usable
image: Why Preservation Matters
digitalpreservation.gov/multimedia/videos/personalarchiving.html

Recommended Formats
• Video: MOV, MPEG, MP4
• Audio: WAV, MP3
• Images: TIFF, JPEG
• Text: PDF, ASCII, RTF

Security

https://blog.knowbe4.com/bid/386493/And-in-THIS-corner-we-have-Dave

The Backup Plan

Original

External
Local
External
Remote

I LOVE IT WHEN A BACKUP PLAN

COMES TOGETHER

Remember…
Action

Fights

● Identify, Organize,
and Describe

Loss, deletion

● Transfer and
Convert

Obsolescence

● Be Secure
● Back it up - 3
places

Cyber attacks
Damage

THANKS
Sam Dyal

Matthew Harp

Engineering and Data
Services Librarian

Digital Projects Librarian

ASU Libraries
samuel.dyal@asu.edu

ASU Libraries
mharp@asu.edu

References
•

BLAKESLEE, B. S. (1990, ). Lost on earth: Wealth of data found in space: Scientists struggle to
extract celestial images imprisoned on fragile, unlabeled tapes. lost on earth: A wealth of data
found in 30 years in space.The New York Times.

•

Personal Archiving, Preserving Your Digital Memories, Library of Congress, http:
//digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving

Research Data Preservation Instruction Modules
•

New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum: http://library.umassmed.
edu/necdmc/modules

•

DataONE education modules: https://www.dataone.org/education-modules

References
Preservation File Formats
Long-Term File Formats (Stanford)
https://lib.stanford.edu/data-management-services/file-formats
Sustainability of Digital Formats, Planning for Library of Congress Collections
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/browse_list.shtml
Get Involved and learn more about all of preservation
ALA Preservation Week
http://www.ala.org/alcts/preservationweek