page_title: Born-digital
section_title: Preservation
hierarchical_section_title: Born-digital / Key Issues / Preservation
caption_attribution_description: 3.5 inch DD (720 KB) floppy disk (back)
context_page_description: The term born-digital refers to materials that originate in a digital form. This is in contrast to digital reformatting, through which analog materials become digital, as in the case of files created by scanning physical paper records. It is most often used in relation to digital libraries and the issues that go along with said organizations, such as digital preservation and intellectual property. However, as technologies have advanced and spread, the concept of being born-digital has also been discussed in relation to personal consumer-based sectors, with the rise of e-books and evolving digital music. Other terms that might be encountered as synonymous include "natively digital", "digital-first", and "digital-exclusive".
context_section_description: Digital preservation involves the conservation and maintenance of digital content. As with other digital objects, preservation must be a continuous and regular undertaking, as these materials do not show the same signs of degradation that print and other physical materials do.  Invisible processes such as bit rot can lead to irreparable damage. In the case of born-digital content, deterioration can occur in the form of bit rot, a process in which digital files degrade over time, and link rot, a process in which URLs link to pages on the internet that are no longer available. Incompatibility is also a concern, in regard to the eventual obsolescence of both hardware and software capable of making sense of the documents.
  Many questions arise regarding what should be archived and preserved and who should undertake the job.  Vast amounts of born-digital content are created constantly and institutions are forced to decide what and how much should be saved.  Because linking plays such a large role in the digital setting, whether a responsibility exists to maintain access to links (and therefore context) is debated, especially when considering the scope of such a task.  Additionally, since publishing is not as delineated in the digital realm and preliminary versions of work are increasingly made available, knowing when to archive presents further complications.
caption: A floppy disk requires obsolete technology in order to read its stored content
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