Bits & Bytes: Celebrating World Digital Preservation Day with Museum of Glass's Newest Initiative
By Marie Williams Chant, Digital Preservation Consultant
Today is World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD), and Museum of Glass is joining individuals and institutions from across the globe to celebrate the preservation of the digital cultural record. Earlier this year, Museum of Glass received a multi-year grant from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust to establish a digital preservation program for its extensive collection of born-digital documentation dating from its founding in 2002. These collections document essential moments in the Museum’s history, and this new initiative will establish policies and procedures to ensure that the Museum will preserve these materials effectively and make them accessible for years to come.
WDPD is organized by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), with this year’s theme being “Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort.” Establishing an initial assessment and plan for the Museum’s newest initiative has been a concerted, cross-departmental effort that will set the stage for effective digital stewardship over time.
What is Digital Preservation?
Digital preservation combines policies, strategies, and actions to ensure access to content that is born digital or converted to digital form, regardless of the challenges of file corruption, media failure, and technological change. The overarching goal of digital preservation is establishing effective strategies to secure the most accurate rendering of authenticated content over time.
There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for digital preservation—the correct approach is determined by the collection content, its significant properties, and the needs of an organization’s designated community. Effective strategies can include or combine bit-level preservation, migration, and emulation.
Bit-level preservation keeps a digital file as-is in its original format and retains it with integrity by taking digital preservation actions. This strategy does not guarantee future accessibility.
Migration takes a digital file to a more stable, preservation-grade format to ensure preservation and future access. Generally, the migrated format would be stored alongside the original format. The goal of migration is to preserve the content, functionality, and visual design.
Emulation creates an environment to render a digital file as it would have appeared or functioned in its original computing setting. This strategy is generally effective for complex digital objects such as software, multimedia, and video games.
Museum of Glass Digital Preservation Initiative
The Museum’s new initiative will take a multi-phase approach in establishing new guidelines for digital preservation and digital access via the Museum’s website.
The Museum’s digital collections are expansive and span from the Museum’s founding in 2002 through present day. The core of these collection include born-digital materials that highlight the captivating stories generated from the Visiting Artist Residency Program. These are photographs and video documenting over 750 artists during the residencies in the Hot Shop, including edited films, documenting, and contextualizing the works of visiting artists into the larger context of art and culture.
During phase one, we are using established assessment frameworks from the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA), and the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) to determine the best strategies, policies, and workflows to scale digital preservation activities at the Museum sustainably. Through conversations with staff and other stakeholders, we are establishing an initial benchmark for digital preservation maturity at the Museum.
After these conversations conclude, we will thoroughly analyze digital preservation-related activities at the Museum and create recommendations, roadmaps, and workflows to take the Museum into phase two of its initiative. Phase two will include implementing and finely honing the recommendations made in the initial assessment and starting inventorying and preserving the Museum’s digital collections. Lastly, the overarching goal is to provide digital access to these materials via the Museum’s website.
Digital preservation is a concerted effort, and this WDPD provides an exciting moment for the Museum to steward history, scholarship, and education relating to the care and collection of glass through next-level digital collections.