How Green is Digital Preservation

Digital preservation practitioners, for the most part, regard themselves as the custodians of our digital legacy, identifying with, and in some cases updating library and archival roles to ensure the safe long-term stewardship of digital assets. Outside of the digital preservation community, it is quite possible (or even probable) that preservation is construed as a mindset where the principal goal is to devise ways of keeping as much digital material as possible in perpetuity. It is only a short step from this assumption to arrive at the conclusion that the whole preservation enterprise is not only environmentally reckless in its ever-increasing demand for server and storage space, but more fundamentally chaotic in its aspiration to defy the capacity of digital librarians, archivists and data managers to keep the social, cultural, scientific and scholarly record well ordered and categorical.