Digital Preservation Planner
Job Title
Digital Preservation Planner
Day in the Life
Preservation planners are responsible for working with institutional partners to ensure that digital collections are preserved in perpetuity. They assess various digital files to account for different formats, encrypted or password protected files, corrupt files, and any other issues with these materials. They create standardized plans that govern how to access, store, and migrate various file types. They also repair problems with digital materials and metadata. They then ensure that original files as well as migrated and corrected files are ingested into an electronic preservation system. Digital preservation planners are responsible for auditing with checksums to validate that no data has changed during transfer or storage.
This job requires attention to detail and a passion for understanding digital files at an in-depth, technical level. A commitment to preserving original files as well as migrating copies to ensure continuing access is critical. One of the primary efforts of digital preservation planning is the long-term work needed to address at-risk collections due to format obsolescence.
Experience Pathway
A preservation planner will need a degree in library science, information science, or computer science and should have a working knowledge of metadata schemas for digital and archival objects. Knowledge of multiple computer operating systems, file format structures, and even digital forensics is beneficial. Experience in planning and managing projects as well as communicating highly-technical information to both software engineers and business managers is a regular part of the workload.
Thoughts from Our Digital Preservation Planners
“Preservation of digital content is still a developing field. While there are standards and best practices to be followed, there are still many areas of the career field that have yet to be explored. New challenges arise all the time. Receiving a collection of files that are of an unknown format and working through the mystery of how to view the contents and convert it to a format that is easily viewable on modern computers can be difficult but rewarding. Researching file formats and creating plans to maintain their usability into the future affords the opportunity to work with other institutions throughout the world and help define new standards and best practices in digital preservation. The job continues to provide opportunities for me to be creative, do deep research, and solve difficult technical mysteries all of the time.”