Digital Continuity

Janet Delve and David Anderson (eds), Preserving Complex Digital Objects, London, Facet, 2014.

Hilary Ballon and Mariet Westermann, writing about the struggles of publishing in art history noted that “It is a paradox of the digital revolution that it has never been easier to produce and circulate a reproductive image, and never harder to publish one.” If publishing in general is in crisis because of the seismic re-ordering in a digital world, the field of art history is the extreme tail of the spectrum; rights holders are accustomed to licensing image content for limited edition print runs.

In human memory, forgetting plays a crucial role for focusing on important things and neglecting irrelevant details. In dig- ital memories, the idea of systematic forgetting has found lit- tle attention, so far. At first glance, forgetting seems to con- tradict the purpose of archival and preservation. However, we are currently facing a tremendous growth in volumes of digital content. Thus, it becomes ever more important to focus, while forgetting irrelevant details, redundancies and noise.

Due to the rapidly burgeoning volume of born-digital records, it behooves archives to determine how they can best bridge the gap between handling analog and handling born-digital records. In addition to analyzing existing case studies of repositories that already accession and process electronic records, the study presented in this paper used both a survey instrument and semi-structured interviews with archivists to investigate whether and how manuscript repositories are handling born-digital materials.

A comprehensive toolkit to help practitioners and middle managers build business cases to fund digital preservation activities. Created by the Jisc funded SPRUCE Project.

* About the Digital Preservation Business Case ToolkitInformation about the Toolkit, who it's for, who wrote it, how it was created and what it's current status is.
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The AIMS project evolved around a common need among the project partners — and most libraries and archives — to identify a methodology or continuous framework for stewarding born-digital archival materials. These materials have been slowly accumulating in archival backlogs for years but are rapidly growing as more contemporary collections are accessioned. Alongside the many and complex technological requirements, the challenges of stewarding born-digital material demand new strategies as well as a redefinition of archival workflows.

The preservation of artistic works with technological components, such as musical works, is recognised as an issue by both the artistic community and the archival community. Preserving such works involves tackling the difficulties associated with digital information in general, but also raises its own specific problems, such as constantly evolving digital instruments embodied within software and idiosyncratic human-computer interactions. Because of these issues, standards in place for archiving digital information are not always suitable for the preservation of these works.

A Paper by NLA Staff: Douglas Elford, Lisa Jeong-Reuss, Somaya Langley and Melanie Wilkinson
Presented at the AICCM conference in Brisbane, August 2012 - 7TH Book, Paper and Photographic Materials Symposium

The British Library, Koninklijke Bibliotheek – National library of the Netherlands, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek – German National Library Nasjonalbiblioteket and the National Library of Norway created a joint report on their perceived common needs and vocabulary for Long-Term Preservation Services: A description of LTP services in a Digital Library environment.
http://www.kb.nl/sites/default/files/docs/KB_Long_Term_Preservation_Serv...