Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Inform... - 0 views
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Mark Ness on 29 Nov 15The preservation of cultural memory falls upon custodians of cultural memory. "Separating usage [allowing users to utilize exact replicas] from the original, digital technology affords multiple, simultaneous uses from a single original in ways that are simply not possible for materials stored in any other form" (p. 2). Although digital technologies afford advantages in the digital preservation of information, using digital technologies for preservation of original works poses ethical and moral concerns not previously encountered. Again, the continual evolution of technological devices and software severely challenges archival efforts. "…technological obsolescence represents a far greater threat to information in digital form than the inherent physical fragility of many digital media" (p. 5). "Jeff Rothenberg, for example, has recently suggested that there may be sufficient demand for entrepreneurs to create and archive emulators of software and operating systems that would allow the contents of digital information to be carried forward and used in its original format" (p. 6). Perhaps the greatest challenges facing digital archiving are "costs and the technical, legal and organizational complexities of moving digital information forward into the future raise our greatest fear about the life of information in the digital future: namely, that owners or custodians who can no longer bear the expense and difficulty will deliberately or inadvertently, through a simple failure to act, destroy the objects without regard for future use" (p. 7). To this end, the "Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group (RLG) have joined together in charging the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information to take this first essential step toward a national system of digital preservation. They have asked the Task Force to "consult broadly among librarians, archivists, curators, technologists, relevant government and private sector or