Dear All,
Some of you will be interested in a guest blog post on the JISC
Preservation of Web Resources blog by Dr James Currall, Director of
Information Strategy, IT Services & HATII Senior Research Fellow,
University of Glasgow.
http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/2009/01/07/the-fetish-of-the-digital/
In the post James speculates about what exactly is the ‘information
object’ that needs to be preserved. He tries to fathom this out with a
number of examples including those from Scottish history, Terry
Pratchett's 'Thief of Time' and Bruce Lee's 'Enter the Dragon'.
Currall concludes that it is the *information* held in digital
containers that is the important thing.
"In 2009 we need to see digital preservation and curation as ‘last
year’s model’, of course we need to understand the importance of
custody, metadata and identifiers, but above all we need to understand
the centrality of the information in the artifacts that we are seeking
to curate and preserve."
Whether we should be preserving 'the essence or the bits' of a Web page
is one of the questions that the JISC PoWR project is very interested in.
So what do *you* think it is we need to preserve? Post your comments on
the blog.
Regards
Marieke
*******************
Marieke Guy,
Research Officer,
UKOLN, University of Bath, BA2 7AY
Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Email: [log in to unmask]
Phone: 01225 703928
For any technical queries re JISC please email [log in to unmask]
For any content based queries, please email [log in to unmask]
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