LibGuide on Digital Preservation

Last year, I created a LibGuide on Digital Preservation Resources for my class in Information Services and Sources. The guide is geared toward librarians, archivists, or basically anyone in a cultural institution who want to learn about digital preservation or needs to learn about it for his or her job.

Understanding digital preservation is crucial for anyone working with digital information, even if you don’t consider yourself a digital archivist. Maybe you are an academic librarian who needs to help professors come up with a data management plan for a grant application, or you work in an archive that has a lot of digital material and they need someone to be in charge of it. Many institutions wind up retraining employees to handle digital preservation tasks rather than hiring for that specific position. Handling digital preservation needs in-house, rather than outsourcing to private companies, is also vitally important for developing these kinds of skills and keeping it in the profession.

The best thing I learned from this assignment is that a ton of people are working on free, high-quality digital preservation resources. Although it’s a new area of library and information science, there’s a supportive community out there, setting standards, developing protocols, and crafting toolkits to jumpstart a digital preservation initiative at an institution.