Digital Preservation Coalition

Discussion - notes and comments

(Notes by Kristy Davis)

• Need to evaluate tools for digital art preservation.
• Capacity is a looming issue: we currently preserve only a tiny amount.  This may be the right way round because the costs of intervention seem to high.
• Is there scope for small, cheap, high volume interventions that can secure a significant proportion of digital art
• How do we define value and who should be entitled to make these decisions.  What might be the terms of reference for establishing value. If we can achieve this then we can establish priorities more effectively
• Discussion on information management issues, particularly regarding metadata
• It’s possible that preserving digital art will get cheaper through time.  In the analogue world the costs of preservation go up through time.  Need to establish a more thorough understanding of costs.
• Repository issue – different languages used which makes things difficult.  ‘Repository’ is not always a useful concept in the context of digital art
• Discussed the need to define content specifications.
• It was noted that a national archive of material from the Internet is in progress.