Transcript why preserve digital assets? - The Arts and Humanities Data Service

why preserve digital assets?
Andrew Wilson
Preservation Services and Projects Manager
Arts and Humanities Data Service
Funded by:
Outline
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Funded by:
what are digital assets
why should we preserve them
how should we preserve them
issues
What are digital assets
• outputs of business activities
– which have value to you for any reason, or
– which have potential to add value to your
activities/business
• intellectual property
• also: knowledge, both extrinsic (written
down) and intrinsic (in people’s heads)
Funded by:
Some features of digital assets
• digital assets in data collections may
(will!) be diverse
• often no print analogue
• preservation requires a rich
understanding of their use and makeup
• importance of metadata
Funded by:
Why preserve digital assets – use case
• increasing significance of data re-use
Funded by:
Why preserve digital assets - necessity
• sheer amount of new information being
created digitally each year
• In 2002 3.5-5.6 exabytes
Funded by:
– almost ¾ of new information created was
digital
– by way of contrast three times this amount
is not recorded (‘information flows’)– 99%
telephone calls
Other reasons to preserve digital assets
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Funded by:
statutory requirements
protect and exploit institutional investments
share innovation and information
aid decision making
build and preserve “the record” of institutional
activity in new formats
• create digital collections contextualized for
different audiences and designed for re-use in
different ways (e.g text and data mining)
• risks and costs of not retaining digital assets
Digital preservation
Funded by:
• storage is not preservation; archiving
and preservation are not synonomous
• use of Open Archival Information System
(OAIS) model: ISO 14721 (2003)
• an immediate need
• general consensus that no single
preservation approach will be sufficient
Digital preservation - approaches
• technology preservation
• technology emulation
– Universal Virtual Computer (UVC)
• data migration
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Issues
Funded by:
• selection
• preservation – in what form and for how
long
• access/use (including discovery)
• trust – integrity of data, authentication of
content
• costs
• IPR
a final thought
“traditionally, preserving things meant
keeping them unchanged; however … if
we hold on to digital information without
modifications, accessing the information
will become increasingly more difficult, if
not impossible.”
Funded by:
Su-Shing Chen, “The Paradox of Preservation”,
Computer, March, 2001, pp. 2-6.
Thank You!
Funded by:
© AHDS