Full Draft of Theory & Craft of Digital Preservation

This weekend I’m submitting the full draft of the manuscript for my book The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation to the publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Update: to make it easier to read, I’ve shared a PDF preprint of the whole draft.

I’ve had a lot of fun working on this on nights and weekends over the last year. I have also learned a ton from everyone who has read drafts of the work in progress.

I’ve had a few folks reach out to me after reading parts of drafts and say things like “I’d love to read more of this. When will it be out?” I’m not sure exactly how long it will take for the next round of review and all the improvements that will come from working with a great press. With that said, drafts of the entire book are now online. Instead of having folks pick through my previous blog posts with the links, I figured I would put them all together in order in this post.

So to that end, below you can find an index to the eight chapters and the intro and conclusion. I’m going to leave this up with all the comments in them. I went through and resolved comments offline in my own copies of these but thought it would be fun to leave up the messy original drafts and a record of all the great input and ideas that folks have offered up to improve the text.

Table of Contents

Introduction Beyond Digital Hype & Digital Anxiety (7 pages)

Section One: Theory of Digital Preservation

Ch 1: Preservation’s Divergent Lineages (14 pages)

Ch 2: Understanding Digital Objects (12 pages)

Ch 3: Challenges & Opportunities for Digital Preservation  (11 pages)

Section Two: The Craft of digital Preservation

Ch 4: The Craft of Digital Preservation (6 pages)

Ch 5: Preservation Intent & Collection Development (13 pages)

Ch 6: Managing Copies & Formats (15 pages)

Ch 7: Arranging & Describing Digital Objects (19 pages)

Ch 8: Enabling Multimodal Access & Use (18 pages)

Conclusion: Tools for Looking Forward (9 pages)

Advance Twitter Praise for the Book

I pulled out a few fun tweets from folks responding to the book that I thought were fun to share.

Gulped down these 3 draft chapters. Really like them and idea of the book: an accessible explanation of digital preservation that https://t.co/nMcQGrXBRb

— Alan Liu (@alanyliu) February 15, 2017

https://twitter.com/save4use/status/877128435696619520

axioms by @tjowens are gold. i want to print them out and show up to meetings with annotated copies #digipres https://t.co/i99LDJQ2XT

— Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez (@elvia_arroyo) June 20, 2017

We all shared what our favorite numbers were today at UNC. This is great, thank you!

— julesies (@julesies) June 21, 2017

Really looking forward to the book! #s 3, 11, and 12 had me cheering out loud. Which I realize may be a bit much, but hey.

— Ryan MacMichael (@supalaze) June 20, 2017