Archiving Digital Materials: An Overview of the Issues

Digitization of content generated by those in academia—be they professors, lecturers, or administrative staff—has had a significant impact on the amount of space needed for storage on college and university campuses. What this paper attempts to address is some of the emerging technologies used for the storage of digital content and how these technologies have evolved since their origin with the American Memory Project in 1989, which is widely credited with starting the digital revolution in storage that is commonplace in offices and centers of higher education throughout the United States. The library's role in developing electronic storage for their own archival materials has had an ancillary effect in the field of digitization. The advances made by some libraries in creating more expansive storage devices that hold content other than text has benefited those in other fields as well.