gengenbach-forensic-workflows-2012

managing digital content notes that “[i]n most cases, organizations have not made their
practices publicly available.” 4
The challenges of digital preservation are well established. 5 At its fundamental
level, digital information exists as electronic impulses written onto a physical medium,
representing bits— “on” or “off,” read as ones and zeroes. 6 These bits serve as
instructions, abstracted through the layers of a computer's hardware and software
systems, that render a digital object in a way that is human-understandable. Thus digital
objects “are recreated each time they are used, based on interactions of numerous
technological components.” 7 Both the physical media and the digital objects on the media
can pose challenges to preservation—hardware obsolescence, bit rot, and corruption of
the physical media itself, legacy software that is no longer supported or available, and
unreadable, encrypted, and/or proprietary file formats, just to name a few. 8 The sheer
magnitude of these challenges has prompted worries about a coming “digital dark age,”
4
Society of American Archivists Technology Best Practices Task Force, “Managing Electronic Records and
Assets: A Pilot Study on Identifying Best Practices,” Naomi Nelson, chair. (2009), 2,
http://www.archivists.org/governance/taskforces/MERA-PilotStudy.pdf (accessed July 2012).
5
Some of these challenges are first outlined in the seminal report of the 1996 Task Force on Archiving of
Digital Information. See Donald Waters and John Garrett, Preserving Digital Information: Report of the
Task Force on Archiving Digital Information. (Washington, D.C.: Committee on Preservation and
Access, 1996), http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub63watersgarrett.pdf (accessed July 2012).
6
Elizabeth Dow, Electronic Records in the Manuscript Repository. (Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow
Press, 2009), 23.
7
Christopher A. Lee, I Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era. (Chicago, IL: Society of American
Archivists, 2011), 5. This is a brief explanation of an otherwise complex process that is explained in
more detail in Jeff Rothenberg, Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Information (Washington, D.C.:
Council on Library and Information Resources 1999), http://www.clir.org/pubs/archives/ensuring.pdf
(accessed July 2012).
8
For more detailed information on challenges to digital preservation, see Margaret Hedstrom, “Digital
Preservation: A Time Bomb for Digital Libraries,” Computers and the Humanities 31, no. 3 (1997),
189-202, http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/42573 (accessed July 2012); Rothenberg, Ensuring the Longevity
of Digital Information; and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Richard Ovenden, and Gabriella Redwine,
Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections (Washington, D.C.:
Council on Library and Information Resources, 2010), 14-21,
http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/reports/pub149 (accessed July 2012).
4