‘Digital’ is all around us, every day. Working in archives is no different. We are just as interested in your photographs, meeting minutes or maps in a digital format as we were in paper. If something has historical value and will be interesting to be people in 50 or 100 years then we want to preserve it, whatever the format.
The difference with digital is that it needs active management to keep it accessible for a long time. We can’t just stick it in a box in the right environment for hundreds of years! Digital archiving is about preserving information regardless of where or how that information is stored, and maintaining access to it.
We use a specialist digital preservation system, Preservica, to manage our digital archives. We need good quality information about the files and their contents before transferring them so we can find them in the future.
Of course, alongside the challenges are opportunities to do new and exciting things with digital. We have been able to archive Dorset for You’s 2012 Olympic Sailing web pages when they reached the end of their life as ‘live’ pages.