What has been found to be the most effective alternate term for “digital preservation” when communicating beyond the library and archives community?

Question

The term "digital preservation" can be a turn-off when there is a need to describe, sell or make the case for implementing this kind of work. Curation, digital stewardship, permanent access... Which terms have proved more successful in describing the activity without boring the recipient into switching off?

Answer 1

The key issue here is audience. For example, "permanent access" seems to resonate rather well with folks in science communities who are currently talking a lot about open access. That is, in that situation, messages about digital preservation hang off their existing focus. Similarly, "long term access" seems to a popular way to describe preservation too.

Digital curation seems to be the most problematic, in that in online discourse it has come to mean selecting and sharing links to things you think are interesting. See discussion on What is the difference between digital preservation and digital curation?

In contrast, "digital stewardship" has seemed to have some resonance as a combination of the long term nature of the term preservation with the active management components of curation. (To this end, see Digital Preservation, Digital Curation, Digital Stewardship: What’s in (Some) Names?).

With all this said, there is a community of professionals already that uses the term digital preservation to describe what they do. In this respect, continuing to use the term digital preservation for communication between practitioners seems to make a lot of sense.

In summery, I think it's best to think about using different terms that resonate with particular audiences and realize that each of these terms comes with it's own context sensitive baggage.

Answer 2

Neil Thomson, former Head of Data and Digital Systems at the National History Museum, uses "Digital Sustainability" (I am starting to use it myself and see the reactions):

We have formed a Digital Sustainability Group. This was originally called a Digital Preservation Group, but we decided that that name gave the impression that is was only concerned with data for which the main purpose had been fulfilled — like a paper archive. However, we recognised that there needed to be active management of current data in order to fulfil the aim of ensuring that the data will be continuously available into the indefinite future.

The whole interview is really interesting:

http://www.dcc.ac.uk/community/interviews/neil-thomson

Answer 3

I'm partial to "Digital stewardship" as I see it drawing on the ideas of Environmental Stewardship with all the associated warm fuzzies that entails. Beyond the positive correlative benefits, the digital preservation/curation/continuity/stewardship community could do worse than to model our approach on what the environmental community has built over the past half-century.

Everyday Choices: Opportunities for Environmental Stewardship (PDF), a 2005 report from the the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, lays out ways to encourage environmental stewardship as part of everyday behavior.

I'll fully admit that green-ness has become (in some ways) merely another decision-point for conspicuous consumption, but I'd consider it success to see the "digital preservation-ness" of various decisions considered to the same widespread degree.

Answer 4

The terms used for describing the digital preservation activity should reflect the vocabulary of your client. My advice is to avoid using curation, stewardship & preservation in the noun sense and if you must, slip them in to your conversation as verbs. Talk about what you do, not about the systems and frameworks and theories.

If you are trying to "sell" someone on digital preservation (specifically, DP) set the stage and explain what digital preservation does, not what it is. Ok, here is my example (longwinded) elevator pitch; critique at will:

"The problem is that digital media is not stable--it has a shelf life just like anything else. The bits of a digital file have a physical representation somewhere, like your hard drive or a disk array. We can't just let this stuff sit, or it will go bad eventually. They call that bit-rot. It's a real thing! Think about all those AOL cds floating around from the 90s. Do you think they are all readable today? So just like grocery stores have insanely complex inventory systems for managing the shelf life of food stores, libraries and archives have to come up with strategies to manage stores of digital data. But digital data has a couple advantages which sometimes make us forget that it is not a stable media. You can create immediate and exact duplications of data, you can nearly instantaneously transfer data, you can transmute data from one kind to another, and more than one person can hold the same data on their e-reader at a time. These are the primary reasons that redundancy has become an industry standard for digitally preserving our information; but redundancy is only the foundation of a data preservation strategy! Digital media has a host of threats that digital preservation strategies can help mitigate... here's my card."

Answer 5

The term Digital Continuity has been promoted by many, including the UK National Archives. I'm not trained as an archivist, but it seems to align quite nicely with the continuum model of record keeping, which I'm sympathetic towards.

The only downside is that the concept of continuity seems to explicitly exclude forensic approaches to digital preservation, but this might not be much of a problem as in many cases it is the continuous care model we want to encourage (rather than hoping you've accidentally saved all the information you need in a form the forensics tools can recover).

Answer 6

Honestly, I have the best luck with a fairly simple transference: "I take care of digital things like web pages the same way libraries have always taken care of books."

This engages people's warm-fuzzies for libraries while giving them a minimally accurate sense of what's going on.

It does feed the misconception that EVERY LIBRARY KEEPS ALL THE THINGS, but oh well. No metaphor is perfect.

Answer 7

Can't help but wonder why no one uses "Digital Conservation". Conservation is a function widely understood in Libraries, it is pretty much the same thing as we're doing for bits and bytes... This doesn't answer the question though as I've never used it in conversation. Well, except to my neighbour who looked doubtful - mostly because she couldn't see the value in the digital, but in a manuscript it was obvious.