Funded by: why preserve digital assets? Andrew Wilson Preservation Services and Projects Manager Arts and Humanities Data Service

Funded by: Outline what are digital assets why should we preserve them how should we preserve them issues

Funded by: 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 exabytes –almost ¾ of new information created was digital –by way of contrast three times this amount is not recorded (‘information flows’)– 99% telephone calls

Funded by: Other reasons to preserve digital assets 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

Funded by: Digital preservation storage is not preservation; archiving and preservation are not synonomous use of Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model: ISO (2003) an immediate need general consensus that no single preservation approach will be sufficient

Funded by: Digital preservation - approaches technology preservation technology emulation –Universal Virtual Computer (UVC) data migration

Funded by: Issues selection preservation – in what form and for how long access/use (including discovery) trust – integrity of data, authentication of content costs IPR

Funded by: 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.” Su-Shing Chen, “The Paradox of Preservation”, Computer, March, 2001, pp. 2-6.

Funded by: © AHDS Thank You!