Digital preservation is a very hot topic for many libraries around the world. They all have the same goal of trying to archive information that is of high relevance for researchers every where. But when it comes to the question of what and how they should digitally preserve information from the Web, issues always arise. So the National Libraries began to develop some approaches to help build up their publication archive. Some of those approaches included using a robot to automatically select resources that are likely to be of research value. Which meant that there was less human interaction involved. Another included archiving based on a agreement with selective commercial publishers. So they were able to constantly build their archives with out having to search high and low for relevant materials.
Although most of these Libraries found ways to digitally preserve they were still faced with disadvantages. Some of those disadvantages included the labor issues. They had to hire more staff to get the work done since the preserving process had lots of material. Another disadvantage was that they were basically going in blind with preserving material that they felt would be needed for future users. This was a major issue because its hard to tell what a future researcher would need when researching.
So back to the main question at heart. What should be preserved? I feel the things that are held of high value should be preserved. And what should be digitally preserved for archives should also be based on judgement of what is relevant and has high value. Meaning I wouldn't preserve someones post from a blog, but I would preserve someones article from a scholarly journal.
SOUND OFF!!!!!
What are your feelings about digital preservation?
Phillips, M. E.(2005, Summer). What Should We Preserve? The Question for Heritage Libraries in a Digital World. Library Trends, 54(1), 57-71.
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5 comments:
my feelings on digital preservation. I would like to see it done for most if not all scholarly things, but it does concern me to rely SO much on technology (but that's probably just me). I noted 2 articles on my blog that you may find interesting, they both bring up similar topics and concerns. I think it is pretty unavoidable, but I am still wary, not so much of cost but of retrieval and mapping.
who gets to decide what things are important enough to save?
cost would be a big issue for most places, you may not have the luxery of doing the preservation the way you would have liked.
I'm still an advocate of preserving more rather than less. Digital storage space becomes cheaper and cheaper all the time (the human resources, of course, do not.) I just don't think we can really know what will be judged important 100 or more years from now. Sure, that means preservng a lot of useless junk, but I don't want to throw out any babies with the bath water.
Thank you all for your comments.
Bridget I agree that all scholarly things should be preserved, If they weren't we as students wouldn't have access to scholarly journals and articles to write our research papers.
Bridget I wonder the same thing about who decides to make the decisions on what should be preserved. I am going to guess that maybe managers make those decisions, but I am only guessing, so don't quote me :)
Carol you are so right. What we think is preserve worthy today might not be the same in the distant future.
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