Skip to Main Content

Research Guides

Digital Preservation: Home

Why?

  • Link rot.  See more.
  • Endangered file formats. See more.
  • Bit rot
    • File format is no longer playable/supported
    • Carrier prone to disintegration
    • No machines left to read/play the format
    • No longer have access to the commercial entity that saved the content (company closed, for example)
  • Disasters
  • Write protection issues

Getting Started:

Some researchers archive just a sample of their digital work, while others opt for full reproducibility by capturing all the web pages of a site and or software and database files and it is entirely up to you which path you choose to embrace.

Remember: Lots of Copies Keeping Stuff Safe (LOCKSS)

Websites

Websites
The ability to archive a website is partially based upon how well a site has been developed, so it is suggested that you review our best practices web development guidelines.  

The Internet Archive might capture your website, but there is no guarantee that the crawler will find your site and even if it does there are known fidelity issues. Using the Save Page Now feature, users can point the Internet Archive to their web-page, but unlike the paid subscription, Archive-It, users of Save Page Now have limited control in regards to scoping the crawl.

If your project is a website, a Web Archive (WARC) file capture of your website is a standard approach to archiving. Visit each page that you desire capturing by using Conifer. Download the capture as a WARC file, then test using ReplayWeb.page before including it as a part of your deposit in CUNY Academic Works.  Note: You must play the entire recording of a video or audio file 

The Global List of Digitally Endangered Species 2021

Images, Audio, Video

Always use the Library of Congress' recommended file formats.   See DPC's The Global List of Digitally Endangered Species 2021.  

Note:  still images, audio, or video files may supplement a thesis or capstone, thesis dissertation submission in CUNY Academic Works by combining several supplemental files into a single .zip or .tar file. 

Alternatively, upload image, audio, and video files to Internet Archive (archive.org) and organize the URLs for inclusion in your CUNY Academic Works submission.  Please see the following for more info.
 

Applications and Software

See the following suggestions for archiving software, etc.