Warning over digital archive ​‘black hole’

It is interesting to again see Digital Preservation on the agenda of the mainstream press and politicians see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-18250826. In this case it is not the technology that is causing the problem - technology such as Tessella's SDB already present solutions in this area. The problems lay with assembling the digital material in the first place.

A workable solution requires the current copyright holder to the information to agree to its archival, an organisation to be nominated to hold the archival information, the processes to be put in place for the information to be accurately captured on a regular basis, and a technology selected that can retain the information for the long term. For many types of information any one of these can pose enough of a problem for the process to be put in the box labelled "difficult" and forgotten about. In the meantime information about today that will be of great interest to the historians of tomorrow is being lost.