Decoding Digital Preservation

What is DIGITAL?

A Physical object?

A Representation of A Representation?

Another Way to Convey Information?

A Different Carrier?

A New Era?

Digital Means a lot.

The historic and scholarly record are increasingly digital.

Where the cultural record used to be written in letters, ledgers, and books, now it's all digital.

What will future historians know about us?

What Digital Preservation Looks Like

Significant Properties
Materiality
complexity

What Digital Preservation is NOT

  • A technical problem
  • Digitization
  • Something that you complete
  • Separate from access

What Digital Preservation IS

  • Infrastructure : Administration (policies), Technical, Resources (staff)
  • Providing access into the distant future
  • An active choice

Digital Preservation at IU

  • Building policies with the Digital Preservation Policy Framework Task Force
  • Smoothing out the technical infrastructure
  • Building out capacities and exploring new areas

Further Reading (And watching)

Decoding Digital Preservation 1.5

By Heidi Dowding

Decoding Digital Preservation 1.5

Presentation given at Indiana University Bloomington Libraries In-House Institute, May 9, 2016.

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