I love checking out your blog and watching the journey of someone with vision and a strong technical background go through an archival studies program.

You’ve just encountered the black hole of digital preservation: databases.

Dynamic information systems built on relational databases for data persistence are the bane of e-recordkeeping and digital preservation. I don’t have time to go into all the issues.

This ERPAnet report does a pretty good job of summarizing the issues and potential solutions.

Based on some work I’ve done previously, I’d say these are the options for dealing with the preservation of databases and information objects stored in database information systems (i.e. the stuff that the journalists want to request under Freedom of Information requests). Each of them requires that the contextual information (i.e. system documentation) is available and up-to-date (yeah, right

1)Technology preservation: maintaining all information within the live system or in a parallel system that mirrors a specific version of the system’s hardware, software and file format configurations.

2) Dumping data into delimited flat files, XML files or standardized SQL and maintaining server audit logs to track all user interactions and data creation, reading, updating and deletions within the system. This is a technique that is being experimented with on the InterPARES Project’s VanMap case study. As well, the Swiss National Archives has been developing a tool (SIARD) to preserve databases using standardized SQL.

3) Treating the entire system as one compound logical object and developing tools to reconstruct the system at certain points in time using a combination of backup data, audit logs and snapshots.

4) Using the data archiving functionality of commercial enterprise information systems (e.g. SAP) to extract and capture discrete ‘archive data objects’ from the system

5) Outputting sets of system information to a more static document format (i.e. rendering database reports or screen captures to PDF format)