Preserving Digital Information: A How-To-Do-It Manual.

TITLE: Preserving Digital Information: A How-To-Do-It Manual

AUTHOR: Gregory S. Hunter

ISBN: 1-55570-353-4

PUBLISHER: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc.

PUBLICATION DATE: 2000

LENGTH: 168 pages

PRICE: $59.95

SOURCE: Any bookstore

Our current capability to create a digital archive has been equated to technological quicksand (Rothenburg 1999). Anyone who has been working on computers for more than 10 years can relate to the pace of digital obsolescence. Just think about trying to read a 51/4-inch floppy disk, a DOS WordPerfect 4.2 file, or a document you have from the days when you had a Macintosh computer instead of a PC. Now challenge yourself to imagine not only how to technically preserve this information indefinitely, but how to choose what to preserve and how to guarantee the digital record's reliability and authenticity to generations of your descendants. How would you decide how many hyperlink levels down you should go when you preserve a Web page? How do you capture the names on an e-mail's distribution list?

The plethora of issues surrounding this topic can be overwhelming, as is conveyed in these words of William J. Mitchell: "The combined problems of immense volume, unstable storage media, and obsolete hardware and software add up to some very tough problems for archivists to deal with." (Mitchell 1996). The discussion of these challenges is the essence of Gregory Hunter's book Preserving Digital Information: A How-To-Do-It Manual.

Given this theme, the moniker of a How-To-Do-It Manual is inaccurate for the majority of this publication. The preponderance of the book is an excellent and well-organized survey of the research on the subject, which often raises more questions than it answers. The book provides a vast amount of background information critical to the topic. However, the greater part of the book is not a step-by-step manual on how to do digital preservation.

Hunter has been involved in multiple research programs regarding the preservation of digital information. He has been in close communication with many other investigation teams and is clearly very familiar with the literature and studies on the topic. Nowhere is this more evident than the bibliography, with more than 400 citations. Hunter is both a certified records manager and a certified archivist. As would then be expected, the perspective presented is largely that of an archivist or librarian, not a computer scientist.

The first two chapters are introductory. The first chapter introduces the challenge of digital preservation and defining terms and concepts. The second chapter provides a primer on the nature of digital information -- how numbers, images, music, and other content are represented, types of physical media, and so on.

Chapter 3 gives an overview of major initiatives relevant to the subject, providing additional context to the challenges. The next chapter starts with a basic and straightforward section on preserving specific media. Midway through the chapter, the author shifts to a sophisticated and thought-provoking survey of four reports on best practices. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss issues and solutions related to e-mail, Web pages, and digital images.

Chapter 7 consists of three well-done sections. The first section discusses assumptions about archives and preservation, which may keep readers from stepping on a land mine as they proceed with their digital preservation program. The second section of chapter 7 reviews key decisions the readers must make as they plan their program and gives guidance as to which road to take with each decision. And the last section gives a seven-step approach to the high-level management of a digital preservation program.

The author has scattered thought-provoking quotations in callout boxes throughout the book. Many of the quotes present a gloomy point of view on the practicability of digital preservation. The sources are such pessimistic papers as "Titanic 2020: A Call to Action," "Dreams, Madness, and Reality," "The Unsettled State of Archiving," and "Overload: There's Just No Way to Save All the Information of the Information Age."

This book is worthwhile for anyone involved in developing a plan to archive any form of digital information. It does not get overly technical with computer terms and details, and it should be very understandable for most records managers or archivists. IS professionals may be disappointed, as well as those readers expecting a detailed specific path for preserving digital information. But as the book points out, there is no single simple solution for this most complex dilemma.

REFERENCES

Rothenburg, Jeff. Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation. Council on Library and Information Resources, 1999.

Mitchell, William J. "Architectural Archives in the Digital Era." American Archivist 59, no 2 (Spring 1996), 200-204.

Michael S. Adler, CDIA, MIT, PE, is a Senior Consultant and Owner of The Adler Group, a management consulting firm in the Los Angeles area. The author may be reached at [e-mail].