Rhiannon's Blog

"Art should not be segregated in museums; it needs to live free among us"

Digital Preservation

Filed under: Uncategorized — rhiannonvt at 12:13 pm on Friday, November 16, 2012

In the readings for this week I thought there were a couple of very interesting points made about digital preservation.

In the video called “Why Digital Preservation is Important to Everyone” on the Library of Congress website the narrator outlines three important factors about saving personal, digital files. 1. They are FRAGILE. 2. They are DEPENDENT on technology. 3. They require ACTIVE MANAGEMENT. These points demonstrate how temporary our digital files can be and that they are much less permanent than their analog counterparts. With this in mind, I wonder if the trade off for a faster, more convenient way of living is really worth it when it may all just disappear after a relatively short period of time. Should we then go back to our old-fashioned methods of communicating and recording our memories?

At the same time though, Roy Rosenzweig’s article “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in the Digital Era” explains that simply “printing out e-mail messages makes rapid searches of them impossible and often jettisons crucial links to related messages and attachments” and that “nor is there any good way to preserve interactive and experimental digital creations”. So essentially going back to analog forms or at least preserving digital records on paper will not solve the problem of digital preservation. Like Rosenzweig said, if we just print out our personal records and store them in a filing cabinet like we used to the records will not preserve the interactivity and easy manipulability of their original digital format. In other words, a paper record does not and cannot equal digital material. Plus we all know how much more difficult it is to search through a huge stack of papers than type in search terms in a database or archive.

The problem of preserving digital material almost seems hopeless then since digital records are subject to their fragility (one glitch can make a whole file unreadable), dependability on technology (which is constantly changing and updating) and their constant need for management and up keeping. And it’s not like we can just go back to analog form since that is also unreliable and will lose a great deal of information when taken from its digital format. What then should we do? Rosenzweig runs through a number of methods that have been/are being used to save digital records but for each one there is something that is lost or will be lost in just a matter of time. I guess at this point it is just important to be aware of this problem and continue to work towards finding a suitable way to save digital files that stays true to the original content and will last for a long period of time.



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