Getting Started With Digital Preservation

This post was written by Elise Bradshaw, Digital Curation and Preservation Specialist | Digital Stewardship (Research).

You invest countless hours into doing groundbreaking research—help it go further by using these simple digital preservation principles to protect your research data for the future. Digital preservation is the active management of digital content to ensure its long-term usability, accessibility, and authenticity. It is critical to maintaining the integrity of research data and ensuring its availability for future generations of scholars. Fortunately, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) offers a straightforward framework that can help. In this blog post, we’ll take inspiration from Level 1 of the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation to explore basic actions every researcher can take to protect their data.

Store And Back Up Your Data

The first step is to ensure your data is stored in a suitable location and the storage you are using is backed up. Backing up your data protects it from being lost due to hardware failure or other unexpected issues. The University’s Research Data Management System Finder can help you find the right research data system to use.

Organise Your Files

Proper file management is essential for digital preservation. Use clear, descriptive file names, and organise your documents in a logical folder structure. The University’s Managing Data@Melbourne training program and File Management 101 educational resource can help get you started.

Document Everything

Create basic documentation that describes the content of your files. This includes metadata, file formats, and any necessary software or tools required to access them. Documenting this information is vital for future access, whether by you or someone else.

Monitor Your Data’s Integrity

Even with well stored, organised and documented data, things can still go wrong. Consider using tools like checksums to verify that your files remain intact and haven’t been corrupted over time. A checksum is like a unique digital fingerprint for each file. The fingerprint should remain the same each time it’s checked. If not, you know there’s been a change to the file.

Learn more

Digital preservation is critical to ensuring the long-term accessibility and usability of research data, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Taking these simple steps will help ensure your research data remains usable for years to come. For information on more advanced digital preservation techniques see the Digital Stewardship Team at the University of Melbourne and the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation Framework.

Featured image credit: Red and White Floppy Disk on White Surface by Fredy Jacob, on unsplash