Digital Preservation?

An interesting issue – re: digital preservation (had some clues of this whilst doing my PhD):

Save all, read all? Matthew Reisz on the archivists devising protocols for preserving born-digital data

An attempt by university archivists to find a common approach to the problem of how to deal with digitally recorded material has led to a groundbreaking paper on the subject.

The “white paper” arises out of a collaborative project headed by the University of Virginia and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with the participation of digital archivists at Stanford and Yale universities and the University of Hull.

Published as AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship, the report focuses on “a common need among the project partners – and most libraries and archives – to identify a methodology or continuous framework for stewarding [the] born-digital archival materials” that have been “slowly accumulating in archival backlogs for years”.

Simon Wilson, senior archivist at the Hull History Centre, a partnership between the university and Hull City Council, said the issue was multifaceted.

“What do we do if people bring in a bag of floppy disks? How do we read them and decide whether they are worth preserving for years to come? How do we access material on a laptop that has died?

“In the past, we just needed the right physical conditions and could store paper-based material for hundreds of years. Now the tools for creating and storing digital material mean we are faced with a fresh challenge every few years. We can’t be technology museums,” he said.

Read full story.