The Cultural Heritage Community does not need an education in how quickly information can become obfuscated, obliterated, or impractical without proper preservation curation and migration – it is the very impetus for the existence of the community. The age of microfilm was a short blip on the historical timeline of Cultural Heritage Preservation, and already, much of the work done during this period is languishing in storage, inaccessible by its target audience with their modern expectations. Moreover, much of the work done on microfilm is now considered insufficient quality to be considered Preservation Grade.
Scanning an image and saving to a hard drive is trivially easy; creating a Preservation Digital Object (PDO) requires careful consideration and continuous vigilance. Technology rapidly evolves, especially those technologies which control how digital information is created, stored, and retrieved. The goal of a PDO is to capture, wrap, and describe data in such a way that enables migration between storage systems, with the specific ability to be indexed and deciphered by future access systems.
It can be easily assumed that the PDO substrate (access and storage) will be in a near constant state of flux. Therefore, the PDO itself (content, container, and metadata) must be created in such a way that they are not dependent on any given type of access or storage.
A PDO is not just a digital copy of the original object. It is a complete package ready to function as a digital surrogate for the original physical object in as many use-cases as possible. A PDO is well structured, easy to access and understand, is well described, and contains high quality content. This means that a requesting entity (patron, researcher, administrator, marketing agent) who wishes to have access to the original object can be instead be offered access to the PDO, with no noticeable difference in value to that entity.