Firstly, I'll introduce myself here: I'm Keith Whittle, Online Projects/Media
Co-ordinator at Film and Video Umbrella and Researcher for Peter Cornwell, ZKM.
I have worked with Peter Cornwell on a number of research projects centred
around the important cultural and media theory issues surrounding archiving,
the need for a radical re-think of preservation strategies at institutional
level, the development of a new framework for Best Practices within the field
and the contribution of 'open source systems' to the conservation of, and
widespread accessibility to cultural media.
As outlined in a recent paper, the objectives behind a number of initiatives
address key issues in the long-term preservation and management of media
collections.
Firstly, loss-less digitisation is employed to remove the cycle of degeneration
that often accompanies the transcription of moving image titles. By loss-less,
we mean a digitisation process that records all the information available on
the original, storing it as digital representation that preserves the original
information frame by frame.
Secondly, that cloning of the datasets is undertaken to maintain the security of
the collection, a practice that increases storage capacity requirements as well
as the demands on the access performance of the storage and the communications
that connect the archive with the mirror.
Thirdly, storage equipment supports open - and widely adopted - data
communications and file store standards. Should such standards evolve, it will
be possible to migrate collections without loss of any information. This also
removes dependency on any single computer company, whilst also removing the
need to discard machines when they reach their end-of-life.
Fourthly, protecting both the intellectual and material property of titles
relies on archive systems that do not require maintenance by highly skilled,
expensive personnel.
The central aim being to adequately present (and to preserve) fragile media
titles and media artworks.
Protein OS
the system
from which
we operate
http://www.proteinos.com
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