Issues and challenges
Ubiquitous and constantly evolving, digital technologies are essential to many sectors, including industry, research, law and medicine. However, digital objects remain fragile in the face of loss of content or context. Their preservation is crucial to protecting investments, exploiting their potential and passing on these opportunities to current and future generations.
Their fragility lies in their dependence on constantly changing technologies, which poses challenges of sustainability and interoperability. Digital preservation must anticipate these developments and adapt to the rapid changes in tools and platforms.
Threats to digital objects
The preservation of digital objects is essential to guarantee their integrity, meaning and accessibility. However, it faces constant threats:
Conserving data
The preservation of digital files relies on keeping the streams of bytes that make them up intact, despite various threats: deterioration or obsolescence of media, accidental loss, abandonment, or malicious destruction. To guarantee their durability, it is essential to maintain a systematic process involving the control and updating of media, file redundancy, regular verification of integrity using digital fingerprints, as well as rigorous management of the locations and responsibilities associated with their storage.
Arcsys manages and monitors the content of the media in order to prevent any alteration.
Degradation of storage media
Computer storage technologies have a limited lifespan, generally 3 to 5 years, making solutions quickly obsolete. This requires regular migration to preserve digital objects. The solution is to transfer the data to a new storage system, without modifying the digital objects themselves, but changing their medium.
Migration is a heavy task for operators. Arcsys facilitates this process by fully automating it, ensuring traceability and performing essential integrity checks.
Retaining the meaning of data
Formats evolve as developers make improvements to integrate new functionalities. When software does not provide for backward compatibility with older file formats, the data can become unusable. Both commercial and open source formats are vulnerable to obsolescence.
The proliferation of file formats poses a problem as significant as their obsolescence. The lack of standardisation can result in a multitude of formats and versions, such as different variants of PDF, Word or images. This problem is amplified in areas where customised formats are developed rapidly. The management and monitoring of these formats, as well as the tools necessary for their use, represent a significant challenge.
While current formats are generally less threatened, less commonly used formats often depend on software that may no longer be maintained. Preservation planning can include file migration, emulation of older software or the use of alternatives.
Arcsys allows monitoring of the formats used, limitation as to acceptable formats and format migration paths while guaranteeing the evidential value of the documents.
Maintaining trust in the data
Digital documents, which are unstable and easily modifiable, require rigorous measures to guarantee their authenticity and integrity over time. This includes monitoring their life cycle, tracing interactions, and establishing links with the business processes of the creating entity. Different sectors, such as research, justice or administration, have specific requirements to ensure the reliability of digital documents.
Techniques such as audit logs and digital fingerprints make it possible to verify the integrity of files. User confidence is based on the reliability of the preservation organisation, requiring high-quality practices validated by audits and certifications.
Arcsys uses cryptographic means and evidence files to ensure that integrity is perpetually preserved.
Preserving context and dependencies
The meaning of digital information may depend on additional information that may have been implicit in the context in which it was created, and is less clear at a later date.
Understanding the data, its use, its dependencies and its context will enable it to be captured for appropriate preservation and documented sufficiently explicitly for the intellectual content to be maintained and understood in the future.
Arcsys allows dependencies to be documented through links and metadata.