RE: [-empyre-] archiving

["Paul Koerbin" <pkoerbin@nla.gov.au>]

Luke

Some or what I wrote in my reply to Adam may be relevant to the question
you ask in regard to what PANdORA is doing to maintain access to an
acceptable presentation of the digital content in the archive. I'm
hoping Gerard who is our digital preservation officer may provide some
more detail on this at some stage through this forum. Certainly
providing meaningful future access is a critical aspect of preservation.
We did attempt to do some work on defining the significant properties of
the digital objects so as to see if we could determine what needs to be
preserved and what, if necessary, could be abandoned. But with complex
objects of the like that make up the online resources we are dealing
with this really was not a very fruitful investigation. Gerard may
correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we would currently lean more
towards migration as our principal preservation strategy, but obviously
emulation may play an important role too as this develops.

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: empyre-bounces@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[mailto:empyre-bounces@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of luke
Sent: Friday, 4 February 2005 10:18 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: RE: [-empyre-] archiving



The Internet Archive is a good resource and we're lucky to have it, but
I've so far never managed to find a complete archived version of
anything! Even important websites are effectively unsurfable because of
the missing pages, broken images etc., and for these reasons we
certainly shouldn't rely on it as the sole preserver of Internet media.

One of the benefits of having a 'sentient' process is that strategies
for preservation could be implemented on a case-by-case basis as the
time and needs arrive. Something that I'm sure PANDORA has considered,
and I'd be very interested in hearing about more, are the ideas around
not only the archiving the Internet, but how the systems of media are to
be made available in 100, or 500 years time when we can only guess the
relationship of user to digital networked media will be entirely
different.

I did a quick look around the PANDORA site and found this line:
"Maintaining means of accessing an acceptable presentation of the
digital object". Paul, I was wondering if you could elaborate on how the
organisation intends to provide future access.

Just quickly - Rhizome.org has an example of strategising (perhaps as
much as you can for an unforeseen future scenario) how to 'preserve',
and not just 'archive', the work included in the rhizome artbase.

http://rhizome.org/artbase/report.htm

The report is weighted primarily to the idea of emulation, metadata and
migration from one medium to another.

Luke
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