Preserving Digital Media: Towards a Preservation Solution Evaluation Metric

With an increasing amount of information being digitized or directly created and subsequently existing only electronically, and coupled with an ever increasing variety of file formats and integrated document functionalities, longterm preservation solutions become crucial. While different approaches, such as Emulation, Migration, or Computer Museums were developed, neither of them excels in all circumstances, and the selection of the most appropriate strategy poses a non-trivial task. In this paper, an adapted version of Utility Analysis is presented, which can be used for choosing an optimal preservation solution for each individual situation. This analysis method comes from infrastructure projects and is here used to combine the wide range of requirements which are to be considered in order to choose a suitable preservation strategy. The evaluation metric will be presented and demonstrated with the help of two practical examples.