Storing is not archiving

When looking at this from the perspective of the human activity that the Archive bears witness to, what matters is the informational content — the evidence of that activity — which is the very purpose of preservation

The term « archiving » is very often misused in the field of information technology.

It is widely used to describe moving data storage to a dedicated space, for the purpose of optimizing commonly used storage space. The same confusion applies to the archiving of physical documents, which some reduce to simply delegating the storage of physical media to another department, by having it transported elsewhere.

When it comes to the digital archiving of documents, one recurring topic concerns the ability of storage media to preserve binary information for the desired length of time, even if that duration is virtually unlimited.

Even though this issue is central, preserving data is not archiving

The fastest, most reliable, most durable storage technologies will never be able to do more than preserve a sequence of zeros and ones that is meaningless to a human being.

To archive, then, is to be able to render the informational content whenever it needs to be used. This is where the concept of encoding, or representation format, comes in — it defines how the binary data is organized. It must enable a technical device to decode the binary stream and provide the user with an intelligible representation of the information it contains, most often on a computer screen.

This, then, is the subject of this series of articles: setting aside the issue of binary data storage, how can we ensure that the informational content encoded in today’s digital formats will still be usable in 10, 30, 500 years, or more?

This need calls for at least three essential actions

Identifying and characterizing the encoding format of digital content. This task can be assigned to the producer itself, if it has the technical tools and knowledge, or otherwise (which will most often be the case) to the department responsible for preservation.

Preserving information about the format along with the means of rendering the information from the digital content. The OAIS model incorporates this into its conceptual model as representation information.

Sustaining the technical means of rendering the informational content throughout the information’s lifecycle. Two main approaches are currently being explored: converting binary content encoded in a format that is becoming obsolete into a more recent or more sustainable format, suited for use by the widest possible audience for a longer or shorter period, or preserving the technical environment that allows the information to be rendered.