DATA CURATION PRESERVATION ISSUES (THREATS TO DIGITAL MATERIALS)

INTRODUCTION

Data Preservation Threats

Digital Curation does not come without pests and diseases in the name of threats. We can look at threats as anything that can cause loss, damage, corruption and inaccessibility of preserved data (Barateiro et al., 2010). Reliability, authenticity, integrity and provenance of preserved data become questionable if threats find their way to a preserved object (Barateiro et al., 2010). The following are threats to data preservation:

1.     Technological Failures

These occur due to technological faults that can lead to loss or corruption of data (Xie & Matusiak, 2016). Software can have bugs which can lead to data loss during ingestion of preserved data.  Hardware can have faults leading to preserved data being inaccessible or corrupted. A good example of a hardware fault is a hard drive gradually developing a fault in one of its sectors. Hardware failure sometimes occurs quite abruptly through power loss or power surge.

Technological failures can be kept in check through frequent monitoring of the hardware and preserved data through checksums, installing power backup system and data redundancy (Johnston, 2020).

2.     Technological obsolescence

Rapid changes in technology brought about by accelerated technological innovations lead to obsolescence of storage media, data formats, hardware and software (Altman & Landau, 2024). Preserved data on a technology rendered obsolete is rendered inaccessible due to failure of finding a newer technology to run the obsolete technology. For instance, a library can have good agricultural information preserved on a microfiche but deemed useless because of failure to find a technology to run the microfiche to access the preserved data.

Microfiche

Altman and Landau (2024) posit that technological obsolescence threat can be kept in check by adopting use of open-source technologies and standards. The threat can also be dealt with through emulation. 

3.     Human Errors

The information economy brings with it an avalanche of data that must be processed daily for preservation purposes. The need to appraise, capture, ingest and store an avalanche of data brings with it fatigue which might lead to human errors in the data curation processes (Xie & Matusiak, 2016). Examples of human errors include deletions and assigning wrong metadata. Apart from fatigue, human errors can come about due to lack of skills to run a technology or manage data.

Human errors threat can be kept in check by running a hybrid curation system aided by artificial intelligence to take away human burnout of digital preservation in an information economy. The threat can also be kept in check through upskilling and retooling of people involved in digital preservation.

4.     Natural Disasters and Climatic Conditions

Natural disasters and climatic conditions such as heatwaves, floods, earthquakes and fire may result in preserved data being corrupted, lost or inaccessible (Barateiro et al., 2010) For instance, servers may be inaccessible and damaged due to a collapsed building and flood water.  

Data redundancy is ideal in dealing with such kind of a threat.

5.     Attack

An attack is malicious damage or alterations, theft or service denial due to criminal, military or political motives. The attack can come from within or outside an information entity. Often viruses and worms are used in attacks.

6.     Lack of funding

Digital preservation is expensive as it is capital intensive and maintenance costs intensive. It needs huge sums of money to install, maintain and update preservation technologies which might exhaust the funds allocated to keeping the data in perpetuity.

CONCLUSION

Digital preservation is a strategic issue, as such, threats to digital preservation need to be viewed as such to gunner the necessary support of fending them off.

 

REFERENCES

Altman, M., & Landau, R. (2024). Selecting Efficient and Reliable Preservation Strategies:: Modeling Long-term Information Integrity Using Large-scale Hierarchical Discrete Event Simulation. International Journal of Digital Curation, 18(1), 24–24. https://doi.org/10.2218/IJDC.V18I1.743

Barateiro, J., Antunes, G., Freitas, F., & Borbinha, J. (2010). 4 Designing Digital Preservation Solutions The International Journal of Digital Curation Issue 1 (Vol. 5). http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis

Johnston, L. (2020). Challenges in preservation and archiving digital materials. Information Services and Use, 40(3), 193–199. https://doi.org/10.3233/ISU-200090

Xie, I., & Matusiak, K. K. (2016). Digital preservation. Discover Digital Libraries, 255–279. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-417112-1.00009-0