Digital preservation is necessary, and costly. I a...

2010-08-04T10:35:38.168-07:00

Digital preservation is necessary, and costly. I agree that it shouldn't be the activity of the elite. However given the amount of data that is produced digital preservation has to evolve as there are extreme sociopolitical pressures to do so. I also suggest there would be natural selection to some degree. Data that is popular will become a meme, negating the argument of out dated software somewhat. I recognize it is not possible to preserve all data, and digital data will always deteriorate to some degree. All this said surely what is valuable enough to be stored in the long term is down to what is deemed valuable, and every human on this planet would have a differing opinion...if they were asked.

Ben - Kindle Case

This is all getting a bit heated -- and long. To t...

2009-05-08T06:38:00.000-07:00

This is all getting a bit heated -- and long. To the extent that you're arguing that digital preservation shouldn't be the activity of an elite which is apart from the institutions with content to preserve, I agree with you. But I'm in one of the few library organizations big enough to have its own ongoing digital preservation activity, which makes it easy for me to say that. Preservation needs its own expertise, though it should work with the institutions that have, not see it self as something above the market.

As I've argued in my own blog, reconstructability should be a primary metric of preservation. This depends on several factors (oh, noes! Obfuscation!), including documentation of the format, long-term availability of software to render it, and ease of extracting some content in the absence of complete information. Some formats are bad on all these counts (e.g., most variants of Word), yet are still widely used. A push in the right direction can get content managers to make more reconstructable choices, just as a push from security experts can get them to create more secure websites.

I'd be cautious about the long-term value of open-source renderers and converters. If an application was written for a 1985 system and hasn't been updated since, what are the chances its source code will compile on a modern machine? Maybe the fixes will be easy, maybe not. But source code obsolescence should be a concern, along with format obsolescence.

Comments on DSHR's Blog: Sheila Morrissey's comment

Digital preservation is necessary, and costly. I a...

This is all getting a bit heated -- and long. To t...