I freelance all over the world with clients interested in managing their data. Digital stuff dies. Managing data - whether that’s a photo, a social media post, event his blog post - is a race against the clock.
The paradox of born-digital is that it’s a lifecycle. All life dies. In the same way, organizations and collections change their policies or collecting interests and must get rid of data. Professional terms like “digital preservation” or “digital archiving” are processes we can implement to slow down the decay. But nothing is forever. We preseve data until it’s lost value in terms of research, materiality, relevance, etcetera.
Another way to look at this is through data formats. Do you remember the VHS tape? Casettes? LPs? DVDs? The answer is probably yes. Now ask yourself, do you have a way to play that format? Do you have a DVD player? Can you even buy a VHS player? One day the answer is going to be a big no.
So what do you do? Document your data management practices, assess your metadata and file formats for preservation risks, and start planning for the reality where you must migrate to a new system.
And remember that migrating data could look like:
- changing its format (think DVD to a digital file on a server)
- moving mass quantities of data from one database to another
- altering file sizes so it fits in a storage medium