I hope the title of this post has gotten your attention—isn’t this an issue that we’re all thinking about? Apparently ISO has been, too, because they’ve just issued ISO/PDTR 26102 Information and documentation – Requirements for long term preservation of electronic records.
From the summary provided:
“Digital records have a number of fundamental differences from traditional records; hence need special treatment to preserve their integrity as records over time. Of immediate concern to all organisations is the ability to retain and preserve those digital records so that their authenticity, reliability, integrity and usability over time are not compromised. This Technical Report provides additional guidance to ISO 15489 specific to managing digital records for as long as they are required. It identifies and addresses the management issues within the limits of technological environments. This Technical Report relies on the concepts set out in ISO 15489 and needs to be applied in conjunction with that standard. This Technical Report is related to document based records, and not to records held in the form of databases.â€
As a reminder, ALA is a voting member of NISO, and NISO is the official U.S. voting member for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 46 on Information and Documentation. ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider this feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote.
As is unfortunately customary with ISO, you can’t look at the document directly, but have to request it from Cindy Hepfer or me. Cindy can be contacted directly at HSLcindy@buffalo, and I can contacted at dih1@cornell.edu. (I’d be grateful if you’d copy me on a request to Cindy, so I can be aware of ALA member interest). Cindy requests that comments be sent to her no later than Feb. 13.