Introduction

Picture

What is Digital Preservation?
Digital Preservation is essentially the proactive management of digital information over time that helps ensure it's longevity.

Huh?
 Ok, simply said it is making sure that things in a digital format do not disappear forever after whatever format they are in, ceases to be a format.


Why Should I Care?
If you have ever owned or heard of 8-tracks, cassettes, Polaroid, VHS, BetaMAX, VideoDiscs, Compact Discs, WordPerfect, Commodore 64, Atari, or Vinyl Records, you should care.

Digital Preservation as we know it is still a very young discipline and there are many ideas about the best practices of going about the process.  This project will discuss some of those examples.

The basic components of Digital Preservation that are a running theme throughout this discipline are:

Language: something that will be able to be read and accessed in a current and future context.
Metadata:  instructions as to how to read the objects and what they are.
Repository:  a safe place to keep these objects that will not suffer from obsolescence.
Security:  once in a repository the objects are safe from outside corruption.



The purpose of this project is to introduce theories, practices and examples of Digital Preservation and how it affects our world in general and more specifically our world as information professionals. We will look at several resources and discuss how and why digital preservation matters to us.




Picture