The general idea and traditional approached of preservation is tied to the notion of keeping things in an unchanged state however the migration to the digital domain contradicts this idea and with the ever changing formats and software; even easy access to the ‘preserved’ becomes an issue (Chen, 2001). One example of this as posited by Chen is trying to accessing records from the Vietnam era would require literacy in so 30year old technology. By inference any format that we use in 2020 must be able scalable, and open for conversion and or migration to more update formats in the future. The challenge here then is an issue of storage space for high bitrate captures. This leads us to the discussion on concepts within the digital preservation process.
There are two ways to look at the information that is being preserved, those that are born-digital and those that exist in other forms but must be converted to digital (Chen, 2001).
Capturing refers to the action of photographing, scanning, recording in video or audio formats; the idea here is to make a digital representation is an authentic as possible manner.
The challenge of Dynamic Links
The challenge with the new digital format is that fact that it is stored somewhere on servers and often times links to website with information gets shifted because of upgrades and new technology (Chen, 2001). In some case the chain of information/custody that relates to a captured object or document becomes hard to find. This is the contention of some who prefer preservation in its physical analog authentic state; if you want to preserve a book and its content you carefully close the book and store it to a secure place with all its related information all together. The issue of storage space for bulk items becomes a challenge in itself but, the same could be said for the digital domain.
The challenge of Evolving Storage Technologies
As alluded to earlier, preserving things to a state of near authenticity will require higher fidelity files and this in turn results in the demand for larger storage capacity.
Digital preservation requires industrial grade storage with the ability to store long lived data way into the future and must be accessed my multiple users with low latency (Baker, 2006).
Interestingly the evolution of new storage technology does not bring a solution to the storage issues, instead the captured date must now be migrated to new formats, platforms and protocols in order to stay relevant with the new technology. This process can be equated to moving the book we once closed and stored safely to a new location; if not done correctly, this can cause wear and tear. Inherent to this process is the fact that equipment develop to read old formats now become obsolete.
The way forward
The quest for authenticity will require the establishment of standards and operational procedures however, with the ever changing technology there will be a continuous catching-up game and navigation between more reliable storage and retrieval formats on faster and more efficient platforms. This means that the digital preservation community will rely heavily on the development in technology ranging from 3D scanning to faster and more accurate rendering time and down the process chain to storage, until that storage format changes and then its time for further migration. The question and debate will continue about the paradoxical nature of digital preservation.
Baker, M. a. (2006). A fresh look at the reliability of long-term digital storage. Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems .
Chen, S.-S. (2001). The paradox of digital preservation. Computer, 34(3), 24-28.
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