Preserving digital legal deposit - new challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Born digital content has always been considered to be a bigger challenge for preservation than digitised content. Higher volume and technical complexity, dynamism as well as a complex surrounding rights space are frequently cited as aspects that make born digital content ‘special’ to memory institutions. This paper builds on the Estonian case of introducing digital legal deposit which has led to an exercise of reconceptualising the digital preservation function of the national library. The rapid increase in volume, file size and new file formats have led to making the library’s preservation service levels explicit, an update to the preservation policy and automation of archiving workflows. The new demands on preservation are pushing the current digital repository system of the national library to its limits and the library needs to embark on migrating to a new preservation solution. This response to a sudden change in digital preservation workload is typical in the heritage sector – upgrading the ingest component is the first instinctive reaction of most memory institutions. This paper proposes that increasing the throughput of ingest component needs to be combined with a modular concept of a preservation system that sets interoperability as its core principle. When digital preservation is conceptualised as an exercise of resilience rather than sustainability, the interoperability requirement for systems architecture and service design follows logically.