Stephen Abrams, PhD, is Head of Digital Preservation at Harvard Library

World Digital Preservation Day is an annual event sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition to bring international attention to the critical challenges and opportunities of digital preservation stewardship. The theme of this year’s celebration is Why Preserve? This question has particular relevance right now given the sea change so many of us are experiencing in our institutional environments. We find ourselves unexpectedly buffeted with new constraints on requisite programmatic resources arising from external actions and scrutiny that seemingly calls into question our fundamental mission and ethos. Preservation is a demanding undertaking at the best of times; why do we affirmatively choose this hard path in uncertain times?

We do so because to do otherwise would repudiate our very identity as stewards, those who undertake the complementary functions of maintaining and advancing; that is, ensuring the continuity of shared experience over time, and leaving things better off than we found them. These imperative goals themselves arise from a deep instinctual human need to remember and reconnect. The indomitable human impulse to tell stories about the past is how individuals, institutions, and cultures bring order and illumination into the world, imparting meaningful sense to our present condition and shaping aspirations for the future.

Positioned as we are well into the 21st century, the raw material for those stories is increasingly digital – if not always in originating form, then almost certainly for purposes of reference and access. The ubiquity of the digital form factor has enabled manifold opportunities for ever-more novel means of commercial, scientific, and cultural production and consumption. In many cases, these would not only have been impractical, but literally unthinkable in the pre-digital era. But all of that promise and progress comes with a cautionary cost of inherent fragility with respect to ever-increasing technological, sociological, and environmental concern, evolution, innovation, and disruption.

During times of great transition and transformation, it is all the more important for the preservation program to rise to the forefront of attention and action. Without proactive adaptation and periodic remediation, the pace of unrelenting change will inevitably precipitate corrosive damage and loss, both to things and our fundamental understanding of those things. We affirmatively choose to preserve so that information, knowledge, and wisdom so painstakingly acquired over time does not vanish and need to be continually re-won, but instead is vibrantly remembered and conscientiously passed along, ever-accumulating in breadth, depth, import, and impact.

Harvard Library was founded in 1638 with a collection of 400 books. Then, as an early history of the Library somewhat laconically stated, “Other gifts of books followed, and the new Library began to grow steadily.” Nearly 400 years later, the Library is the largest such academic institution in the world, holding over 20 million physical volumes, 400 million manuscripts, 10 million photographs, and one million maps. In the digital realm, the Library is responsible for more than 11 million works, represented by 238 million files in 110 formats, totaling 2 petabytes. All of these materials are subject to curation and stewardship in order to advance learning, research, and the pursuit of truth central to the University’s mission.

Preservation lies at the heart of the Library’s commitment to that mission and “pertains as much to born-digital content as to our analog collections and the digitized surrogates created from them.” Thus, it remains incumbent on us to labor as necessary to capture and hold fast the digital traces of yesterday and bring them forward for critical insight and understanding of an every-unfolding past, an ever-complex present, and an ever-potential future.

At the time our (much younger) neighbor, the Boston Public Library, was founded in 1848, its Trustees articulated a bold statement about the primary importance of the Library’s collections not merely in terms of their physical embodiment, but rather in their more abstract functional role as “the great medium of communication between mind and mind, as respects different individuals, countries, and periods of time.” Memory work is the way we bridge between difference and commonality, and between what was, what is, and what should be. This vision is as germane now as it was almost a hundred years ago, and suggests a new, revitalizing way to think about digital preservation. Despite its obvious technological dependencies, the preservation enterprise is fundamentally a humanistic act of communication unfolding across archival timespans and geo-socio space, cognizant of and ameliorating the communicative friction induced by ever-yawning cultural as well as technological distance.

By preserving, we remember, and by remembering, we reflect, learn, accept, and touch the future.

So, why preserve? Because we’re stewards, and that’s what we do.