Digital preservation

What is digital preservation?

Digital preservation is the coordinated, ongoing set of processes and activities that maintains digital materials in understandable, accessible and usable forms for long term use by user communities, beyond the limits of technological or organisational failure or change.

The level of digital preservation reasonably attainable for digital materials varies based on factors such as format, complexity and available technology.

What are digital materials?

Digital materials encompass data, records, collection objects and outputs in electronic form including text, images, audio, moving images, 3D assets, and immersive media, that can be accessed by a computer.

They can be born digital (created digitally), or digitised (physical and analogue materials which are converted into digital files).

Digital preservation at the University

Since 2013 the University of Melbourne has been developing its Digital Preservation Program with a vision to make the University’s digital materials of enduring value available into the future.

We are active participants within the digital preservation community, through our Digital Preservation Coalition membership, and engagement in local and global digital preservation forums and events.

Our services

The University provides a range of services and infrastructure in support of managing digital materials for the long term. This includes the work of archivists, librarians, research data management and technology experts from multiple areas of the University.

The Digital Preservation Program within the Digital Stewardship (Research) team in the Library, provides the following services to the University:

  • Impart information and advice to staff and researchers on appropriate strategies, actions and tools for the preservation of digital materials including storage, metadata, file format identification and migration, and fixity checking.
  • Administer the digital preservation repository (DPR) system
  • Facilitate ingest of eligible digital materials into the DPR, in collaboration with collection custodians
  • Determine and oversee preservation workflows and actions for digital materials held in the DPR.

The Digital Preservation Program is not a collecting body and we are unable to provide archiving or records processing services. Please refer to University of Melbourne Archives or Records & Information, as needed.

Digital preservation guides