UKOLN
Raising Awareness

"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

Digital Preservation and Curation

What is Digital Preservation and Curation?

Digital preservation is an umbrella concept that refers to the diverse range of activities needed to ensure that authentic digital assets survive and remain accessible and usable over time. While the roots of the digital preservation problem are chiefly technological, it has been clear for many years that solutions will also need to address questions of organization, finance and policy. For example, in an article published over a decade ago, Margaret Hedstrom defined digital preservation as "the planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable" (M. Hedstrom, "Digital preservation: a time bomb for digital libraries," Computers and the Humanities, 31 (3), 1997, pp. 189-202).

Digital curation is a related concept that emphasises the need for some classes of digital material -chiefly research data - to be managed in ways that support both the verification and reproducibility of existing research as well as the re-use of data in new research contexts. For example, the basic definition provided by the Digital Curation Centre says that "digital curation, broadly interpreted, is about maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use" (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/about-us).

Resources

UKOLN publications and presentations on digital preservation and curation topics

Projects

UKOLN participates in the following projects and initiatives which relate to digital preservation and curation:

For information on other UKOLN work on repositories, please see our Digital Repositories pages.

The digital preservation and curation activity at UKOLN has a variety of different foci, including: research data management and curation, repositories, Web archiving, the large-scale digitisation of texts, and preservation metadata.

We have also been involved in the following older projects and initiatives: