By Danielle Emerling and Jessica McMillen
Archives and special collections in the West Virginia and Regional History Center (WVRHC) document local, state, and national history. Physical collections of books and paper require stable environmental controls and professional care for preservation, but the increasing volume of digitized and born-digital collections demand even more intentional maintenance and careful stewardship — or risk being lost forever.
Selection of items from the WVRHC’s digital collections.
The WVRHC began scanning its vast photograph collection in the early 2000s, creating the widely popular digital collection, West Virginia History OnView. Today, OnView features more than 54,000 photographs, and the WVRHC hosts over 2 dozen digital collections and exhibits spanning the Civil War, West Virginia University publications, criminal identification, and more.
These collections offer only a glimpse of the vast records still awaiting preservation. The WVRHC houses more than 115 terabytes (the digital equivalent of 58 million books or 29,000 high-definition films) of digital assets waiting to be preserved and made available to the public.
That number is estimated to grow to almost a petabyte as the WVRHC turns its attention to preserving thousands of analog audiovisual assets through digitization and transferring data from obsolete formats, such as floppy disks.
Increasingly, newly acquired collections are “born digital,” meaning they are created digitally, with donations of hard drives or file transfer replacing boxes of paper. As collections move from shelves to servers, digital preservation has taken on new urgency.
Why the need for digital preservation?
The shift toward digital information has transformed how we access knowledge and what we expect from it. Digital access has made archives and special collections more broadly and equitably available.
But there is no access without preservation, and while the world has grown increasingly digital, the infrastructure and strategies required to preserve digital material have not always kept pace.
The expectation that digital means permanent is a dangerous illusion that ignores how fragile digital content can be without intentional, sustained efforts.
Digital records face threats like hardware failure, natural disasters, and bit rot, which is a gradual deterioration of digital data over time. Formats become obsolete, storage media degrades, and without careful stewardship, valuable records can be lost. Additionally, preservation work is increasingly threatened by aging infrastructure and the intensifying impacts of extreme heat, humidity, and storms.
Behind the curtains: Libraries’ preservation strategy
In 2022, WVU Libraries launched a digital asset management and preservation initiative to safeguard the priceless stories, research, and history captured in the WVRHC’s collections.
Now, the Libraries is integrating its digital materials into Hyku, an open-source digital repository application built on Samvera, a community-driven, open-source framework. The Samvera community brings together librarians, archivists, software developers, and technologists who collaboratively design and sustain infrastructure supporting digital collections, scholarly communication, and open educational resources.
Hyku integration was a natural progression for WVU Libraries, building on more than a decade of experience with the Samvera platform and reflecting a continued commitment to open, community-driven infrastructure. This model allows WVU Libraries to both benefit from and contribute to a dynamic community, extending the library’s long tradition of sharing — now no longer only books and research, but expertise itself.
As members of the Samvera community, WVU Libraries has benefited from 3 Institute of Museum and Library Services grants to continue enhancing digital preservation. Designed to pilot, host, and expand use of the Hyku platform, especially for smaller institutions across several states, the grants underwrote WVU Libraries’ very own Tracy McCormick, a full-stack developer in the Systems department, as a Hyku community-supported developer. In this role, McCormick works with a global network of partners to maintain and enhance the Hyku software.
In addition to the Hyku repository, WVU Libraries’ digital preservation strategy involves both onsite and geographically dispersed storage to safeguard against loss. Newly installed onsite storage infrastructure in Morgantown provides secure storage for digital collections, complemented by a cloud backup for added protection. This ensures that even if 1 location is compromised, the data remains accessible elsewhere.
Behind every server, software enhancement, and community collaboration are the people who make preservation possible. The WVRHC, Systems, and Knowledge Access and Resource Management departments work together to digitize and describe collections with professional standards and best practices, recover data from obsolescent media, monitor and audit the integrity of digital assets, and install and maintain the digital systems supporting it all.
Without this expertise, digital collections risk obsolescence or data corruption, threatening the loss of invaluable cultural and historical resources.
The future of our digital preservation efforts
Digital preservation at WVU Libraries will continue to evolve, adopting emerging technologies to enhance how collections are described, analyzed, and shared.
To support these advancements, WVU Libraries must invest in upgrading and expanding equipment to support digitization, manage born-digital collections, and enable integration with artificial intelligence-driven systems and linked open data networks. This evolving approach will improve both preservation and access, allowing future generations to engage with cultural and historical materials in new and innovative ways.
WVU Libraries is approaching the challenges of preservation and access to our collections by leveraging partnerships and expertise, allowing for a more sustainable approach. We are not only making our collections available to the WVU community, West Virginians, and the world, but we are helping other institutions of all sizes make their collections more accessible as well.
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Did you know?
The most endangered and high-priority materials for digitization and preservation in the WVRHC’s holdings are analog audiovisual media. These media include thousands of items in a range of formats, from reel-to-reel film to cassette tapes. They hold irreplaceable content, such as West Virginia public media broadcasts, WVU Athletics films, and oral histories with coal miners, to name only a few.
Preserving analog audiovisual materials presents several challenges, primarily due to the physical degradation of the media over time. Tapes, films, and records are vulnerable to deterioration, leading to loss of quality or total data loss. The equipment required to play back and digitize analog formats is also becoming obsolete, making access and transfer to more stable digital formats increasingly difficult and expensive.