Book Review: Protecting Your Digital Sources

Information Management Journal, Sep/Oct 2004 by Holland, Michael E

Book Review: Protecting Your Digital Sources TITLE: Protecting Your Library's Digital Sources: The Essential Guide to Planning and Preservation AUTHOR: Miriam B. Kahn ISBN: 0-8389-0873-X PUBLISHER: American Library Association PUBLICATION DATE: 2004 LENGTH: 120 pages PRICE: $40 U.S.; $36 ALA members SOURCE: ALA Order Fulfillment, www.alastore.ala.org or 886.746.7252

Those familiar with library and archives literature over the past few decades will recall the vogue of disaster planning and disaster recovery plans in the 1980s. While a heightened awareness of the need to be prepared to deal with damaged collections was long overdue, it became a mark of sophistication to have a complex and comprehensive planning document in place.

Many of those documents languished and have little current applicability because of neglect and failure to update the plans and maintain contact with resource and service suppliers. Some disaster plans made their way into obsolescence through failing to inform and train new employees or simply by failing to include newer digital resources.

In Protecting Your Library's Digital Sources: The Essential Guide to Planning and Preservation, Miriam Kahn makes a useful effort to address the third reason for the obsolescence of disaster plans - failure to update plans so that they deal with digital as well as more traditional media. The book is written for the benefit of "less well-funded libraries and archives and other cultural institutions [that] need a practical 'how-to' guide to plan for the future of their data whether it be for access tomorrow, next year or in ten years." Kahn's 120-page guide addresses "prevention of loss, the restoration of data or digital materials, and planning for long-term access to these materials." The well-written, comfortably paced handbook for libraries, museums, archives, and records centers is divided into two major sections. Section one deals with the common causes of data loss, such as system crashes, infrastructure failures, or hacking, and provides some insights on how to prevent and recover from digital data losses. Section two, the heart of this book, discusses policy decisions and procedures to increase the life span of digital resources. Section two also provides a series of 29 checklists that can guide the disaster-planning workgroup through a demanding and complex task with greater ease.

Kahn's style is clear and succinct and her advice is practical and highly applicable. Chapters one through six comprise section one and address responses to common disasters and how to plan so that an information agency's response is measured and efficient as well as effective.

In chapter one, "Preventing Common Causes of Loss," the author discusses the most common causes of data loss: accidental erasure, hacking, viruses, power losses, and connectivity interruptions. She provides a useful review of the most common and important strategies and methods for preventing incidental data loss and operational collapse when disaster cannot be prevented. Her strategic emphasis in this first chapter is on disciplined and scheduled data backup and on operating a mirroring data site.

Chapter two, "Planning for the Worst: Loss of Computer Operations," addresses the restoration of acceptable computer environments and functions that will allow normal operation to begin at the earliest possible time following an episodic disaster. Issues such as safe-guarding access to hardware, software, and operating systems, as well as physically protecting and restoring enterprise data assets, are discussed briefly but clearly.

In chapter three, "Basic Considerations in Disaster Response Planning," Kahn lays out the structure and architecture of the disaster-planning process. The chapter provides clear identification and discussion of the decisions that must precede the development of an effective disaster recovery and response document. The preliminary issues are identified as team membership, work group responsibilities, prioritization of resources, and coordination of site and enterprise-wide disaster-planning efforts.

Chapter four, "Disaster Response Planning," addresses the contents and structure of the written disaster-planning document. A list of the components of a well-crafted and practical plan is included. Chapter four also discusses the overarching environmental requirements for putting the plan into effect, such as budgetary authority, staffing, administrative support, and communications.

Chapters five, "Disaster Response: When Everything Goes Wrong," and six, "Disaster Response Planning for Hardware and Physical Storage Media," relate to the process of assessing the initial damage caused by a disaster and then activating the response plan in a measured, efficient way to meet the needs of the organization.

Section two of Protecting Your Library's Digital Sources is the more interesting and original of the book's two sections. This is largely due to the focus of chapter seven, "Protecting Data for Long-Term Retention," and chapter eight, "Decision-Making for Today and Tomorrow," on the unique and special needs of digital content creators and aggregators within archives, museums, and libraries. Rather than addressing the protection and preservation of physical storage media, these chapters focus on the development and use of standardized digital data formats that can increase the odds of readability and access into the future.