What to preserve?

Significant Properties of Digital Objects

Date: Monday April 7^th 2008
Venue: British Library Conference Centre

Photographs from the Event

Significant properties are essential characteristics of a digital object which must be preserved over time for the digital object to remain accessible and meaningful. Proper understanding of the significant properties of digital objects is critical to establish best practices and helps answer the fundamental question related to digital preservation: what to preserve?

The importance of significant properties has been highlighted by a number of notable digital preservation initiatives in recent years. These include a range of projects funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the European Union, in which work has been undertaken to investigate the factors affecting decisions on significant properties, to establish generic models for determining them, to develop tools and services for describing and extracting them, or simply to understand complex digital object types, using the concept of significant properties as a starting point.

JISC, the British Library and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) are organising a joint workshop on 7th April at the British Library Conference Centre. The intention is to bring together the relevant projects and report on progress to date.

To open PDFs you will need Adobe Reader - click on the logo:

Neil Grindley (JISC) Welcome and introduction

Keynote Speaker Andrew Wilson (NAA) Presentation PDF 199KB

Stephen Grace (CeRch) INSPECT Project Presentation PDF 1.3MB

David Duce (OBU) JISC Study 1 - Vector Images Presentation PDF 1.6MB

Mike Stapleton, (SSL) JISC Study 2 – Moving Images Presentation PDF 561KB

Brian Matthews (STFC) JISC Study 3 – Software Presentation PDF 1.1MB

Richard Davis (ULCC) JISC Study 4 – e-Learning Objects Presentation PDF 1.0MB

Adrian Brown (PLANETS) Preservation Characterisation in PLANETS Presentation PDF 1.5MB

Roger Lloyd (Barclay Wealth) Industry / Media Presentation PDF 839KB

Colin Neilson (DCC) SCARP Project Presentation PDF 719KB

Stephen Rankin (on behalf of David Giaretta) (DCC) Digital Object Semantics Presentation PDF 453KB

Cal Lee (UNC Chapel Hill) SIGPROPS Presentation PDF 193KB

Andrew Wilson (NAA) Comments/summary

Chair, Chris Rusbridge (DCC) Discussion

Frances Boyle (DPC) Closing Remarks

Key to acronyms:

Carol Jackson carol@dpconline.org