Planning and Implementing a Sustainable Digital Preservation Program

More and more libraries are scaling up their digitization, digital scholarship, digital archiving, and data management programs. All of this effort could be lost to a major failure of technology, a shift in administrative priorities, or a loss of institutional memory. The loss would not just be the materials themselves, but also the resources used to build and promote these collections to users. This issue of Library Technology Reports (vol. 55, no. 6) will help libraries assess their current abilities, determine what they are committed to preserving, develop administrative and technological support, and create a digital preservation program that will be sustainable through organizational and technological change.

Erin Baucom is an assistant professor and the digital archivist at the University of Montana. She is responsible for developing strategies, workflows, and policies for ingest, management, and preservation of born-digital materials acquired archives. She provides digital asset management instruction to the students, faculty and staff of the University. She earned her master's degree in library science with a concentration in archives and records management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016. She also holds a BA in history from Old Dominion University.