Digital collections sit at the intersection of two closely related, but fundamentally different, goals: preservation and access. Learn how they work together and where the Veridian platform fits within this ecosystem.

These terms are often used interchangeably, but understanding the difference between them is important for libraries, archives, and cultural heritage organisations focused on creating digitisation programmes that are sustainable in the long-term.

Defining the two goals

Digital preservation

Digital preservation is about keeping content safe, authentic, and intact over time. Its focus is longevity, with timelines often measured in decades.

Within the GLAM community, this work is commonly described using the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model (also known as ISO 14721:2025), which outlines the functions needed to preserve digital materials over the long term.

Preservation activities typically include:

• Maintaining high-quality archival master files.

• Protecting against data loss, corruption, or bit-rot (the gradual decay of digital data).

• Tracking integrity and changes over time.

Some preservation platforms place significant emphasis on mitigating long-term file format changes and hypothetical future risks. While these considerations are valid, many organisations take a more pragmatic approach — focusing first on robust storage, fixity, redundancy, and documentation, while planning to address format migration if and when it becomes necessary.

Digital access

Digital access focuses on making content discoverable, usable, and presented in ways that are meaningful to today’s users. With users expecting fast, reliable access now, not just confidence that files will exist in the future, timelines are more immediate.

Access activities typically include:

• Full-text search and browsing.

• Clear, user-friendly interfaces.

• Mobile and accessibility support.

These are supported by platforms designed for good performance, high uptime, and scalability.

Why the distinction matters

Preservation and access have different, and sometimes competing, requirements. For example:

• Preservation favours stable, low-change environments.

• Access requires frequent updates, indexing, and optimisation.

• Cold storage keeps data safe for the long term, but isn’t designed for fast or frequent access.

• Highly optimised access platforms, often still can’t meet all preservation standards on their own.

When preservation and access goals become blurred, organisations can run into problems, such as:

• Fragmented workflows between preservation and access teams.

• Difficulty adapting systems as technologies and standards evolve.

• Reduced usability or performance for end users.

Fully implementing digital preservation typically requires a combination of dedicated systems, workflows, and organisational commitment.  While some platforms attempt to address both preservation and access, delivering both equally well (especially at scale) usually requires specialised systems working together.

Where preservation and access intersect

While they serve different purposes, preservation and access are closely connected.

Key elements that support both include:

• Well-structured metadata (e.g. descriptive, structural, and administrative metadata).

• Reliable identifiers that link access copies back to the original source material.

• Standardised file formats that remain readable over time.

• Well-defined relationships between the original source files, access versions, and metadata.

As digitised materials are accessed and used — often through access platforms tailored to specific content types — issues such as broken file relationships, metadata gaps, or inconsistencies can emerge. This helps strengthen preservation efforts by enabling these problems to be identified and corrected at the source over time.

The challenges balancing digital preservation and access

In our experience, many GLAM sector organisations face similar challenges when trying to balance preservation and access:

• Budget constraints: preservation and access often require different infrastructure and expertise.

• Technological change: File formats, storage media, and software don’t stand still.

• Data integrity and authenticity: Ensuring files remain complete and well documented.

• Scalability: Collections grow over time through new content, rescans and richer metadata.

• Content diversity: Supporting many different material types (e.g. books, newspapers, audio, video, manuscripts) introduces additional complexity in how content is described, managed, and presented to users.

Where the Veridian Software platform fits in

As previously noted, some platforms support both preservation and access to some degree. In practice, however, systems optimised for long-term preservation are rarely optimised for high-volume, high-performance public access; particularly for complex, large-scale collections such as digitised newspapers.

Veridian Software is designed to support key parts of this broader ecosystem, with a focus on access and discovery. Where it makes sense, we incorporate best-practice features that support preservation efforts. For example, as part of our backup and data-handling processes, we use BagIt for fixity verification to detect file corruption and confirm data integrity over time. That said, Veridian Software does not implement the full suite of OAIS-compliant preservation functions, nor is it positioned as a complete long-term digital preservation system.

Instead, Veridian is designed to complement established preservation strategies. Through this work, we have experience working with specialist preservation services such as MetaArchive and Amazon Web Services Glacier, allowing our team to offer practical guidance to organisations exploring preservation approaches within a broader, standards-based framework.

Planning how preservation and access fit together
for your digital collections?