Digital Curation and Preservation

Digital curation and preservation encompass the policies, practices and technologies that ensure long-term access to and usability of digital assets. At its core, digital curation addresses the selection, organisation, description and stewardship of digital materials throughout their lifecycle, embracing both born-digital content and digitised surrogates of analogue records. Preservation extends these concerns by safeguarding integrity, authenticity and context, mitigating risks of technological obsolescence through actions such as format migration, emulation and fixity monitoring. Together, curation and preservation underpin research transparency, cultural memory and institutional accountability. They draw on interdisciplinary expertise from information science, archival studies, computer systems and domain specialists, and increasingly operate within collaborative networks to share tools, standards and best practice. As the volume, diversity and strategic importance of digital collections continue to grow, effective curation and preservation have become essential to support open scholarship, cultural heritage initiatives and data-driven innovation across the globe.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Scholarly editing and publishing have entered a new phase with the rise of born-digital cultural materials. Recent work outlines the need to reimagine editorial workflows to accommodate artefacts that do not originate in print—such as social-media posts, digital fiction and interactive media—while maintaining rigorous scholarly apparatus. Authors advocate for integrated platforms that support versioning, annotation and peer review within a digital ecosystem, and call for close collaboration between scholars, digital curators and technologists. This approach demands interoperable metadata frameworks, persistent identifiers and sustainable infrastructure to ensure that born-digital editions remain accessible, traceable and preserved for future scholarship.

Research from all publishers

A set of guiding principles for trustworthy digital repositories has been proposed, emphasising transparency, responsibility, user focus, sustainability and technology (the TRUST Principles). These principles offer a practical framework for repositories to build organisational structures and technical workflows that inspire confidence among stakeholders. They address issues such as governance, provenance recording and service continuity, and stress the importance of audit and certification to demonstrate reliability.

Comparative studies of institutional repositories in East Africa reveal that many academic libraries lack comprehensive preservation policies and actionable plans. Assessments underscore the value of multi-stakeholder engagement, clear policy objectives and capacity building to bridge gaps in governance, metadata quality and infrastructure. The findings suggest that co-developing strategies with researchers and IT services can strengthen long-term stewardship.

Investigations into web archiving fixity have shown that conventional cryptographic hashes often fail to verify the integrity of dynamic web pages. Empirical tests across public archives demonstrate that embedded resources and dynamic metadata frequently change, yielding mismatched hash values. In response, archive-aware fixity functions have been proposed that discount transient elements while reliably authenticating core content, enhancing trust in web replays as research and cultural heritage resources.

Digital Curation and Preservation publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in digital curation and preservation across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Born-digital: Materials originally created in digital form rather than converted from physical formats, requiring specialised editorial and preservation workflows.

Format migration: The process of converting digital content from one file format to another to prevent obsolescence and maintain accessibility.

Fixity check: Verification of digital object integrity by comparing stored checksum values over time to detect unintended alterations.

Emulation: A preservation strategy that recreates the original hardware or software environment to render digital objects as originally intended.

Persistent identifier: A long-lasting reference (such as a DOI or ARK) assigned to a digital object to ensure stable citation and retrieval.

References

1. The born-digital in future digital scholarly editing and publishing. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2023).
2. The TRUST Principles for digital repositories. Scientific Data (2020).
3. The status of the digital preservation policies and plans of the institutional repositories of selected public universities in Kenya. Insights the UKSG journal (2022).
4. Hashes are not suitable to verify fixity of the public archived web. PLOS ONE (2023).