Heroic measures

Preserving digital information is a difficult and poorly understood problem. The current inability to accomplish digital preservation is a major impediment to the adoption of digital forms on a grand scale. Recognizing this, in December, 1994 the Commission on Preservation and Access (CPA) and the Research Libraries Group (RLG) convened a Task Force on Digital Archiving. In May, 1996 the Task Force issued its report, entitled "Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information." This paper has been written in the context of, and partly as a response to, the Task Force report. It analyzes migration as a preservation strategy and, as a counterweight to an overly narrow technical focus on "the digital object," it argues that use considerations -the purposes for which the digital materials being preserved are to be used -must figure centrally in any preservation strategy.