blog: Categorizing Motivations for Preserving Digital Objects

I'm currently thinking about the 'Significant Properties' of digital objects. This terminology has been bandied around for some years now but has recently been referred to by a number of JISC-funded projects and studies, chief amongst which is the INSPECT project, based at CeRch (previously the AHDS).

The aim of the INSPECT project is to investigate what aspects of digital objects are worth preserving in order to ensure that they are accessible and meaningful over long periods of time, and this builds on earlier work done at the National Archives of Australia to define the notion of 'performance' as it relates to Digital Preservation. This means that the function or appearance of a digital object can be adequately enabled or rendered (with reference to the original) irrespective of the measures and processes that have been applied to that object over time to ensure its survival.

So what's the relevance to CHArt you might ask?? Well, INSPECT has looked at raster images and a couple of the other studies have dealt with Vector and Moving Images so there is a definite relevance to those dealing with aspects of storing and archiving digital imagery.

Reports available at:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_preserva...

But, what has got me blogging is more the fact that I'm working on a presentation on this subject that myself, Stephen Grace (CeRch) and Grant Young (TASI) are going to give at the Imaging Science & Technology conference in Bern, Switzerland, 24 June 2008.

I've warmed to the idea that those who think about digital preservation will do so from five different perspectives, none of which are mutually exclusive.

1. Political
2. Cultural/Sociological
3. Technical
4. Philosophical
5. Prosaic

1, 2 and 3 - whilst encompassing masses of different thinking and complexity -represent a fairly ordinary breakdown of approaches to an area of activity. But I think 4 and 5 also have quite a lot to offer in terms of describing people's attitudes to preservation. The idea of 'performance' and the related idea of the 'essence' of a digital object (also talked about by the National Archives of Australia) has got me thinking both philosophically - and (by way of reaction those thoughts) non-philosophically (or prosaically) about why 'do' preservation.

Ultimately, perhaps the prosaic approach is mainly the one that most people take most of the time. They ask themselves ... 'OK, have I got the time and the bit of software required to also make a copy of this in a format that I know is sensible ... errr ... yes, I have. OK. I'll do it.'

Job done.

I quite fancy the idea of working out ways of characterising different communities according to their potential to be motivated by any of the 5 different preservation temperaments. As my job is to promote the idea of Digital Preservation on the national HE/FE agenda, I wonder if knowing how to complement one community's principal motivational area with another complementary community might result in more powerful overall motivations for undertaking wide scale preservation activity. Digital preservation as social engineering!