digital preservation

Is the Future Perfect?

16 April, 2012

The overriding message from the Future Perfect conference was that the future is not perfect! There are lots of digital preservation challenges that we're still grapling with, but on a more optimistic note, we *are* making headway.

Making the Most of Digital Resources

2 June, 2010 | in DCC News

The digital universe grew by 62% in 2009, but those adding to these resources need to think long term if they want to make best use of their public funding. So concludes a new JISC-funded report by the Digital Preservation Coalition, which defines the essential parameters for a preservation policy.

A Digital Divide?

12 May, 2010

My attention was drawn this week to the PLANETS White Paper, The Digital Divide - Assessing Organisations’ Preparations for Digital Preservation, which summarises the findings of a Market Survey last year of 200 organisations around the world.

SUN PASIG: October 2009

19 October, 2009

As readers of this blog may have guessed, I was in San Francisco for the iPres 2009 Conference (17 blog posts in 2 days is something of a personal record!). This conference was followed by several others, including the Sun Preservation & Archiving SIG (Sun-PASIG), from Wednesday to Friday. I didn't feel quite so moved to blog the presentations as at iPres (and I was also knackered, not to put too fine a point on it). But I did not want to pass it b y completely unremarked, particularly as I really like the event.

iPres 2009: Pennock on ArchivePress

6 October, 2009

Blogs are a new medium but an old genre, witness Samuel Pepys’ diaries for instance (now also a blog!). But since they are web based, aren’t they already archived through web archiving? However, simple web archiving treats blogs simply as web pages; pages that change but in a sense stay the same. Web archiving also can’t easily respond to triggers, like RSS feeds relating to new postings. Web archiving approaches are fine, but don’t treat the blogs as first class objects.

Forgetting to remember

10 August, 2009

After a Sunday Times article prompted yesterday's piece of whimsy, a Tweet from my standard Twitter search ( (digital OR data) AND (preservation OR curation), since you ask) produced an interesting article by Chris O'Brien, a columnist for MercuryNews.com: "Time to clean up your digital closet". He goes quite nicely through the various ways in which our personal digital content is more at risk than we might think (media degradation, device and format obsolescence, and the sheer anonymity of large quantities of digital stuff).

Remembering to forget

9 August, 2009

Are we getting this digital preservation thing all wrong? An article in today's Sunday Times quotes Viktor Mayer-Schonberger that we're creating a "digital memory that vastly exceeds the capacity of our collective human mind". James Harkin reports that Viktor wants us to forget more. Mind you, the main (and earliest) example given concerns an unfortunate photo from as recently as 2006.

Turmoil in discourse a long term threat?

28 July, 2009

Lorcan Dempsey mentioned a meeting with Walt Crawford, whom I don't know, in the light of his feeling that "some of the heat had gone out of the blogosphere in general", and reported:

Rosenthal at Sun-PASIG in Malta

28 July, 2009

I was very pleased to hear David Rosenthal reprise his CNI keynote on digital preservation for the Sun-PASIG meeting in Malta, a few weeks ago now. David is a very original thinker and careful speaker. I’ve fallen into the trap before of mis-remembering him, and then arguing from my faulty version. I even noted two tweets made contemporaneously with his talk, that misquoted him and changed the meaning subtly (see below).

SNIA "Terminology Bridge" report

4 June, 2009

Quite a nice report has just been published by the Storage Networking Industry Association's Data Management Forum, called "Building a Terminology Bridge: Guidelines for Digital Information Retention and Preservation Practices in the Datacenter". I don't think I'd agree with everything I saw on a quick skim, but overall it looks like a good set of terminology definitions.