About Digital Preservation at NYPL
The NYPL Digital Preservation program is responsible for material acquired or created by the Library’s Digital Imaging Services, Media Preservation Labs, Media Preservation Services, and Digital Archives programs. Primary activities include:
- documenting workflows
- monitoring storage environment
- auditing processes
- performing preservation interventions
Staffing
- Hilary Shiue - Digital Repository Coordinator
- Nick Krabbenhoeft - Assistant Director, Digital Preservation
About Digital Preservation
The program’s short definition is that “Digital preservation ensures reliable long-term access to digital objects”. We understand each component of that definition as follows:
- ensures - we prefer to document, monitor, and audit rather than to perform heroic interventions
- reliable - we maintain processes that can adapt to changing technology, staff turnover, and new types of collections, so that other parts of the library can focus on their roles
- long-term access - we think about how our work can support access today and 25 years in the future
- digital objects - we work with any collection material that can be stored digitally, whether digitized or born-digital, original or derived
There’s no one true way to do digital preservation. We constantly compare our own policies and processes to others’ in hope of refining and improving them.
About this site
This site was started in June 2016. It aims to document work in order to share it with the community and invite discussion. You can find the source code for this site here.