Are you an IT archivist or a business information archivist?

There is a lot of debate about using storage and cloud storage in particular to archive digital information. I believe a better question is: Are you an IT archive or a business archive?

A really good way to answer this question is to ask yourself are you preserving bits or are you preserving business information. If you are doing the former then you are likely to be an IT centric archive - you are looking after files but care little about their contents or usage. If your focus is on providing the business consumer archived material they need in a form they can use it then you are a business archive.

This simple rule of thumb goes a long way to distinguishing between online storage services (bit preservation) and digital preservation systems (preservation of business information). Of course it is not possible to preserve information if you cannot preserve the bits underpinning it, but bits alone are only half of the story. This is quite neatly captured in Tessella’s digital archiving maturity model, feel free to download the PDF.