Protecting Your Library\'s Digital Sources : The Essential Guide to Planning and Preservation

Contents: Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. I: 1. Preventing common causes of loss. 2. Planning for the worst: loss of computer operations. 3. Basic considerations in disaster response planning. 4. Disaster response planning. 5. Disaster response: when everything goes wrong. 6. Disaster response planning for hardware and physical storage media. II: 7. Protecting data for long-term retention. 8. Decision-making for today and tomorrow. 9. The future: organizations involved with the study of the preservation of electronic records. 10. Checklists. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index.

"Disasters come in all shapes and sizes. Bad things can happen to good digital resources from floods and fires to viruses and computer crashes. Both library staff and customers are dependent on costly hardware, software and electronic collections. Electronic information may be more susceptible to problem than print resources. Moreover, storage issues and long-term accessibility for digital materials that require dated or obsolete hardware can often be overlooked. Without a plan for damage containment and recovery, a collection or library may have to close, either temporarily or permanently.

Preservation and disaster expert Kahn brings clear guidance and practical expertise to address libraries worst-case scenarios before they happen. Providing both short and long-term planning and preservation tips, Kahn provides critical preemptive advice to help you protect and preserve the right information. Featuring 29 proven, all encompassing checklists and forms that help in designing a data protection plan along with real experiences shared in four case studies this is the authoritative e-preservation resource of reference librarians, preservationists, archivists and records managers who create and maintain electronic resources." (jacket)