The life cycle versus the continuum

I feel that I could know more about digital preservation. To help erode my ignorance, I take every opportunity to trawl the web in search of what other, more talented and better funded, people are doing in this area. There are many projects out there. In fact, the number is almost overwhelming and certainly confusing.

I've been struck by the number of projects that engage the life-cycle as a model for looking at the challenges of long-term digital preservation. At least, this seems to be the case in Europe and America. I'm a continuum person myself and I'm surprised at the lack of take-up of this alternative approach to the RM/Archive function, particularly in an electronic context.

The life-cycle model is unhelpful. The continuum model provides a more useful way of looking at the problem of digital preservation. Reasons for this include:

• it's no longer feasible to divide records creation, use and eventual destruction/retention into time-based stages managed by either records managers or archivists;
• as archivists we can't afford to wait until the end of the cycle to become involved, especially when talking about digital records; and
• the record keeping systems used to manage digital records needs to be conceived of and designed as part of a continual process by all interested parties.

This isn't a question of semantics, as some people think. It's about recognising that electronic/digital records have changed the way we conceptualise and do archival and records management work.