Interview on the occasion of the Digital Preservation Day: „Our entire culture is based on data.“

FK: Dear Felix, my first question is perhaps a little unoriginal, but let's start with the basics: What actually is digital preservation?

FB: Digital preservation is about storing data over a longer period of time, and as the word “digital” suggests, it involves digitized data. This data can take very different forms. Data from cultural heritage, for example, should be preserved for posterity. In my department, we mainly work on projects to preserve research data, i.e., data that is generated during the research process - at some stage of the research data cycle. The cycle includes the collection of data, for example measurements that are carried out in experiments or surveys of user groups and the like. Then there are further phases in which this data is analyzed. The analysis software that is developed during this process should also be stored together with the research data. So the aim is to archive as much of the research context as possible. Ideally, the majority of the research results should ultimately be made publicly accessible.
FK: And not only for scientists who are currently working specifically on this project, but ideally also for other researchers who can also benefit from this data, right?
FB: Exactly. Ideally, the data is accessible to everyone. However, there are sometimes restrictions, e.g. with patents, that limit public accessibility. But even then, there is often a limited group of users who can access the data and work with it.

FK: This makes it clear that the digital preservation discourse is actually relevant for everyone who conducts research in any form, because research data is generated in every discipline and in every research project. This actually brings us to the second question: Why is digital preservation so important?

It makes sense to choose open format that have proven successful

FB: Research is very resource-consuming and expensive. A great deal of effort is often put into projects such as the particle accelerator at CERN, which are projects worth billions. Smaller projects also require considerable resources and should be worthwhile. If the project is planned carefully, the results can be used beyond the project itself, even to answer completely different research questions. Digital preservation aims to preserve valuable data over long periods of time. Various requirements must be taken into account, e.g., the format in which the data is made available. Over a period of 25 or 50 years, it could be that a viewer or editor for the original file format no longer exists. It therefore makes sense to choose open formats that have proven successful.

FK: Why?

FB: In many cases, proprietary formats do not disclose their specification. If the format changes, you do not know how to interpret the data. It is also important to capture the entire context of research data, i.e., not only the data itself, but also the conditions under which it was created - such as room temperature or the equipment used to conduct the experiment. This context can be described as metadata, which are divided into organizational, administrative, technical and descriptive metadata.