Two fundamental digital preservation strategies are refreshment and migration. These strategies are designed to preserve the integrity of digital items and to enable you to retrieve, display, and use them despite changing technology.
Digital Preservation Fundamentals
An acute preservation challenge lies in saving digital items. Technology enables us to create, use, and be enriched by information in ways that were unthinkable generations ago. But the same advances that make sharing information so easy also pose some problems. The complexity and diversity of technology is overwhelming, even as storage capacity becomes cheaper. The volume of digital data, unstable storage media, and obsolete hardware and software make the usability of digital items a challenge.
Archival Finding Aids Explained
A finding aid is a term used by archivists to describe the various kinds of written descriptions they produce about collections. An aid can be any descriptive tool: published or unpublished, manual or electronic, produced by the creator, the records management program, or the archival repository.
These guides were captured on paper for years, then were created in Word and Excel documents. Now, they’re frequently encoded using Encoded Archival Description (EAD), a standardized system that allows users to find primary sources more easily.
A Deeper Dive into Archival Description
Arrangement in Archival Collections
Archives and Memory
Levels of Archival Arrangement—A Primer
To establish context when performing arrangement, archivists start with an understanding of the overall body that produced the records. Archivists keep evidential and information values in mind to create a scheme that protects both. As part of archival collections management, they also think about audiences, as archives usually have more than one.
