Preservation and conservation in the digital age; what does the future hold in libraries and archives?

Abstract

Libraries and archives have served as centers of instruction and learning since time immemorial through preservation and conservation of vital knowledge, and through availing channels of access and use for the same to all who need. However, the nature of the creation, transmission and retention of knowledge and information sources is changing fundamentally in this era of rapid technological advancements. As a result, many new issues arise for libraries and archives. The records, the books, the libraries and the archives of yester year are not the same as those of today. This paper gives insight into archives management with a special interest in the areas of preservation and conservation. It also establishes the need for collaboration between libraries and archives as an important strategy to curate information and knowledge in books, records and archival information sources for universal memory by building digital collections of our historical materials as well as developing an infrastructure to support the archiving of born-digital material for scholarly communication. Furthermore, the paper highlights challenges of archiving in the digital age and how they are affecting preservation and conservation measures in libraries and archives as they move from a memory based on physical artifacts, to a hybrid digital and physical environment, and then increasingly shift towards new forms of digital memory.