Leeds, UK | Oxford, UK | 11 May 2010. A digital preservation policy is the vital first step organisations must take if they are to be able to access rapidly growing volumes of digital data in the future.

This is the conclusion of a report, Digital Divide: Assessing Organisations’ Preparations for Digital Preservation, released this month by the European Commission co-funded digital preservation project, Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services), this month. The report presents the findings of a survey into the work of 200 organisations worldwide to maintain long-term access to digital information.

Unlike information held in physical formats such as paper, information held in digital formats is prone to short lifetimes. Storage media can deteriorate rapidly and hardware or software required to read them can quickly become obsolete. Typically, digital information has a lifespan of years to decades rather than centuries.

The report highlights the rapid rate at which the volume of digital information is increasing and the importance organisations attach to preserving it for the long-term. Key findings:

• The volume of digital content that organisations expect to archive will rise 25-fold over the next decade from an average of 20 terabytes (TB) now to 500 TB in 2019.

• Eighty per cent of organisations already need to preserve documents and images now; 70 per cent will also need to hold onto databases, websites, audio and video files in ten years’ time.

• Ninety-three per cent of organisations are aware of the challenges of digital preservation. Seventy-six per cent include digital preservation in their operational planning, 71 per cent in their business-continuity planning and 62 per cent in their financial planning.

• Just 48 per cent of organisations have a digital preservation policy and 47 per cent a budget in place. This drops to one in four public sector institutions. Eighty-seven per cent of organisations plan to tackle digital preservation and 77 per cent plan to invest in a solution within two years.

• There is demand for technology to automate the processes of planning preservation, profiling collections and preserving content by converting it into more accessible formats.

• Organisations with a digital preservation policy are more likely to include digital preservation in their planning, three times more likely to have a budget for it, four times more likely to be investing in a solution now and three times more likely to have a long-term solution already in place. Those without a policy are four times more likely to have no experience of or be unaware of the problem, three times more likely to have no plans and twice as likely to put off purchasing a solution for over two years.

Dr Adam Farquhar, Programme Director and Head of Digital Library Technology at the British Library, which coordinates Planets said: “Work to preserve digital content for the long-term is led by organisations such as national libraries and archives which have large volumes of content and a legal and moral imperative. Over the next ten years, other types of organisation will be faced with the same challenges when the volume of digital content they hold rises to comparable levels and they are subject to legal, regulatory and commercial pressures.”

Preserving digital content requires ongoing action to convert information into new and accessible formats, or to simulate the environment in which it was created. It also requires the authors to document information so that a file can be interpreted in future.

Dr Robert Sharpe, Head of Digital Archiving Solutions at Tessella, which carried out the survey for Planets, said: “The move from information stored in paper to information stored in digital formats has presented organisations with new archival challenges and organisations must act now. It is clear, however, that organisations with a preservation policy are much further down the road to a solution than others.”

-ends-

For further information or to speak to Dr Adam Farquhar or Dr Robert Sharpe, contact:

Media Contacts

Christina Tealdi
AR/PR Executive
Tessella
+44 (0) 1235 546 638

christina.tealdi@tessella.com

Jane Humphreys
Planets Dissemination and Take-up Sub Project Lead
The British Library
+44 (0) 1937 546748

jane.humphreys@bl.uk

To download the report, visit: www.planets-project.eu

Notes to Editors

About Planets
Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) is a four-year €15 million project co-funded by the European Commission under its Information Society Technologies (IST) priority of the Sixth Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration (IST-033789).

Since 2006, the project has been working to develop a framework and a suite of technology to enable institutions in Europe to manage and access their digital collections for the long-term. Planets is coordinated by the British Library and delivered by 16 Consortium partners, comprising national archives, national libraries, research institutions and commercial companies in Europe.

For more information, visit: www.planets-project.eu

About Tessella
For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas.

Tessella has proven expertise in the area of reliable and authentic long-term preservation of electronic records, for both government and scientific organizations. In recent years a number of mainly academic and government organizations have been at the cutting edge of facing up to the digital preservation challenge and Tessella plays a key role in a number of the most practical of these initiatives.

With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Dr Robert Sharpe is the co-author of Mind the Gap: Assessing Digital Preservation Needs in the UK, which was published by the Digital Preservation Coalition in 2006. The report was the culmination of a UK Digital Preservation Needs Assessment (UKNA) study to investigate the current state of digital preservation in the UK and to assess and develop a clear way forward.

For more information please visit: www.digital-preservation.com

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