Internet Content Preservation

Copenhagen.


The next session at COST298 begins with a paper by Eva van Passel, whose focus is on open and dynamic archives. Digitisation and digital preservation are increasingly seen as important strategies to safeguard audiovisual heritage - but the digital versions of such audiovisual materials are often almost as fragile as the original materials, due to changing standards. In Belgium, the BOM-Vlaanderen project drives some of the thinking on these issues - and it is especially interested also in incorporating user wants and needs into its process.

I'm spending the morning at the 2008 Arts Libraries Society of Australia and New Zealand conference, at the Queensland State Library. I'm afraid I'm only here for the opening keynotes (one of which I'm giving) - my hectic schedule for this week between overseas trips doesn't give me any more time to see what else is happening.

The first keynote speaker this morning is Kathryn Greenhill from Murdoch University, presenting on the possibilities of Second Life as a platform. She begins by taking us on a flight around Info Island - the central library island in Second Life - and follows this with a quick explanation of what Second Life is and how it works. The aim here, she notes, is immersion, not just information.

Boston.
We're starting the post-lunch session here at MiT5 with a paper by Marlene Manoff, titled Volatility, Instability, Ambiguity: The Evolving Digital Record. She has been working in collage art for a long time, and notes that recently viewers of her work are increasingly asking whether the artworks were created through digital means (they weren't). This is a sign of a wider trend towards a growing ambiguity of digital objects, also forcing us to see traditional objects in new ways and challenge the nature of cultural objects. This is also a form of interpretation and re-interpretation of existing objects, and the emergence of digital media has led to a concern about the dehistoricisation of media; a failure of archives to connect new to existing work. The digital record, in fact, is particularly susceptible to distortion and manipulation, and this is increasingly a focus of research.

Some Dinner Venue!

We're back now for day three of the conference, following the lavish dinner at New Parliament House last night. Robin Dale from the Research Libraries Group begins the day's proceedings, which focus this morning on the topic of collaboration. She points out that in the current environment collaboration is increasingly important, and in such collaborations, the issue of mutual trust, and trust in the content repositories, becomes particularly crucial. How can trust be established, and trustworthiness assessed?