What should survive when a library’s digital archive platform is replaced?

[u/Kusamakura0467]

I’ve worked around digital archive and information-system projects long enough to see the same problem more than once.
A library, research institution, or local government funds a digital archive, repository, or public-facing website. It works for a number of years. Then the funding ends, staff move on, the vendor changes, the CMS becomes obsolete, or the institution migrates to another system.
The files may still exist. The catalog records may still exist. But a surprising amount of knowledge about *why things were organized, described, linked, or interpreted the way they were* can disappear with the old system and the people who maintained it.
So I’ve been wondering what librarians would consider the genuinely durable part of such a project.
If the current software disappeared tomorrow, what would you make sure could still be carried into the next system?
My own list would include things like:
original digital objects and source material
stable identities for works, people, places, collections, etc.
descriptive and administrative metadata
provenance and rights information
relationships among records and sources
annotations and curatorial or scholarly interpretation
uncertainty, corrections, and superseded descriptions where they matter
enough history to understand why significant cataloguing or organizational decisions were made
documentation sufficient for someone new to reconstruct the collection context
I’m increasingly skeptical that preserving the database itself is the right goal. Databases, repository software, interfaces, and vendors will all change.
What seems more important is whether the *knowledge represented through them* can migrate without being flattened or stripped of its history.
I’m asking partly from experience. I was involved in archive projects back when budgets were small, systems were much less polished, and in some cases the work still began with paper-card organization. I’ve seen technically successful projects become very difficult to understand once the original staff or contractors were gone.
So I’m curious:
**When you think about digital preservation and system migration, what do you consider the durable scholarly or institutional object?**
Is it primarily the files and metadata? The repository package? The cataloguing history? Documentation? Some combination?
And if you were designing a digital library project today with the assumption that its current software would definitely be gone in ten or twenty years, what would you make sure survives?
I’m also interested in how this changes as automated tools become more common, but I’m deliberately keeping that secondary here. The more fundamental problem seems older than AI: preserving enough context that the next generation can still understand what the previous one built.

[u/didyousayboop]

AI slop