from Washington Post -
Saving Our Digital Heritage
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This article asks - which also can be taken as as a sort of counterpoint to the earlier post on the on-going effort by the British Library to archive a snap-shot of e-mails, although not directly related in any way:

"Responsible preservation of our most valued digital data requires answers to key questions: Which data should we keep and how should we keep it? How can we ensure that we can access it in five years, 100 years or 1,000 years? And, who will pay for it?"

These are also questions that museum collections must face up to, albeit phrased slightly differently.
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from The New York Times -
British Library, You’ve Got Mail, and It’s Not Spam
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Another effort at digital preservation and this time using the unique medium of e-mail to document a sample of "everyday" (and some might say "mundane") life. The larger objective of the entire exercise being to build "the first archive of its kind" as a sort of "electronic time capsule".

"The British Library is famous for its collections of 'official history.' What’s great about the collection of e-mail messages is that it’s a 'democratic resource' that shows how people really lived."

The claim that this collection of messages are somehow representative is perhaps a result of wishful thinking. It would be more accurate to qualify that it "shows how people with access to e-mails really lived" in a world where only 12% have access to a computer.
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from The New York Times -
One Picture, 1,000 Tags
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from The Chronicle Daily News Blog -
Metropolitan Museum Will Let Art Historians Use High-Quality Digital Images Free
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from National Public Radio -
Preservation of Digital Art Poses Challenges
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PLANETS - Digital Preservation Research and Technology
go to web-page

Museums and the Web 2007
go to conference web-page
go to online conference papers

With the increasing spread of digital technology, museums and archives have also begun to consider the impact and implications of its use - both in preserving digital works created by others and also creating their own digital interfaces in allowing easier access to information.
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from New York Times -
Is That Just Some Game? No, It’s a Cultural Artifact
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A sure sign of the coming of age of popular culture is when it is seriously considered for preservation. This we can say of video and arcade games, while still mindful of the complexity of the task ahead:

"[P]reserving video games presented certain challenges. For example the hardware that games are played on changes so frequently that there are already thousands that can only be played through computer programs called emulators, which, while readily available on the Internet, technically violate copyright laws."

from Scientific American -
Artists ponder future of digital Mona Lisa
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Saving what is essentially impermanent, though seemingly foolhardy, may not be impossible, if there is a concerted effort and strategy. Media and content migration are 2 such well-established approaches. Another, which might be more a shift in mind-set than technological, is that:

"... art lovers should consider digital art more like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, something to be revisited periodically and brought back to life through different performances."

In final analysis, heritage and cultural preservation, in all its various guises, can only be as effective as the collective drive to value what is being preserved.

from CNET
Digital archivists look to porn, Flash for tips
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The best bet for long-term preservation, especially in the digital realm, would seem to run counter to the traditional view of preservation, which is one that is: "highly controlled by skilled professionals, who often deal with tangible, long-lasting and, in the case of museum quality art, highly expensive materials".

Instead, for digital materials to survive, they must depend on a coummunity of networks to make a multitude of copies and spreading these copies far and wide, so that some might still be around in years to come. So the whole idea of stringent copyright, as we know it today, is the enemy of digital preservation. Or putting it another way: "Data's got to continuously move to stay alive; and it's got to be frequently accessed by a lot of people. Open source, publicly documented formats and software will be the long-term survivors".

from Rambling Librarian
So NLB is archiving Singapore websites...
go to blog post
go to NLB's Web Archive Singapore

Better late than never ... as Singapore joins the wider effort in preserving digital contents.

Noticed a couple of weblogs with a focus on (heritage) preservation.

World Heritage Forum
From the weblog:

This website is made to exchange information on UNESCO World Heritage issues.

HangingTogether
From the weblog:

HangingTogether is a place where some of the staff at RLG, a membership organization of libraries, archives, and museums, can talk about the intersections we see happening between these three different types of institutions. We travel to our members a lot and go to conferences and wanted to be able to take note of the interesting things we see along the way. Stop in, stay awhile, and hang out.

Closing the year with links to 3 articles, each covering an issue which could be seen as pointing to emerging trends in heritage preservation and conservation.

from CBC
U.S. artifacts at risk because of poor storage
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The recent Heritage Health Index Report on the state of storage of heritage collections in the United States may be a depressive read, but the underlying forces resulting in such a state of affairs began much earlier, when pressure to reign in costs in museums often resulted in support functions being sidelined. In moving forward, there must be renewed recognition (and funding) for the essential long-term nature of the care of tangible heritage artefacts - building both (in-house) professional expertise and infra-structure for processes and physical spaces.

from New York Times
If Cambodia Can Learn to Sing Again
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With intangible heritage, the picture seems rosier, with increasing levels of awareness and number of initiatives in documenting, recording and making available various reference resources of intangible traditional heritage, which might otherwise be lost due to a break in transmission. Disruptive acts of war or political apathy, notwithstanding.

from BBC news
Classic poets' voices go online
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Advances in digital technologies have made the realisation of a separate category of heritage materials inevitable. Digital collections, which often incorporate references to either tangible or intangible heritage, are increasingly seen as the next frontier in heritage preservation. Although not likely to supersede tangible or intangible forms of heritage materials, digital collections will nevertheless fulfill the role of enhancing the long-term effort in preserving the memory of human civilisations across the world.

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Wishing one and all a Happy and Peaceful New Year!

from The Guardian
Off the shelf and on to the web
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A new initiative, The Open Library, which will digitally scan actual pages of books in the public domain and making these available via the internet. This is digital preservation with a public service face - and a huge one at that. This parallels nicely with the Turning-the-Page project which selectively make available British Library collections through a similar web-based interface.

However, the one big difference between the 2 projects lies in that the Open Library project allows for specific word searches in the books scanned, hence enabling these older books to be more usable to the generation which grew up with internet technology.

from Digital Preservation Mailing List
iPRES presentation

Just to pass on an update originally posted on the digital preservation mailing list.

----- Original Message -----

Dear colleagues,

the live recordings of the presentations at the
International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES)
15 – 16 September 2005 in Göttingen
as well as the respective pdf documents are now online and can be viewed at:

http://rdd.sub.uni-goettingen.de/conferences/ipres/programme

All the best,
Heike Neuroth

Dr. Heike Neuroth
Research & Development - DINI secretary
http://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de/ - http://www.dini.de/
Goettingen State and University Library (SUB)
Papendiek 14
37073 Göttingen

from BBC News
Original Alice work in 3D online
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Highlighting the Turning the Page project at the British Library, which currently has 14 historically significant books (in the British context, at least) that can be browsed virtually. An acceptable compromise between preservation and access, surely.

from Tate Online
Media Matters
go to web-page

Dealing with time-based media art in museums' permanent collections would necessarily involve the close collaboration of "curators, conservators, registrars and media technical managers". Adding to Tate's latest initiative, there are 2 papers and a conference currently archived on Tate's web-site that is of related interest.

PIP LAURENSON
"Developing Strategies for the Conservation of Installations Incorporating Time-based Media: Gary Hill's Between Cinema and a Hard Place" (Tate Papers, Spring 2004)
go to online paper

PIP LAURENSON
"The Management of Display Equipment in Time-based Media Installations" (Tate Papers, Spring 2005)
go to online paper

Conference, 4 June 2005
"Curating, Immateriality, Systems: On Curating Digital Media"
go to archived conference

from New York Times
Even Digital Memories Can Fade
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Yet another update from the digital preservation front. Sometimes the alarmist tone of how unprepared we all are in terms of saving our digital resources for the next generation can mask other interests. Note, for example, near the start of the New York Times article, that the person who said: "To save a digital file for, let's say, a hundred years is going to take a lot of work" is actually the president of a consulting firm which deals with (digital) media management - surely it would not be in his interests to say that digital archiving is easy. For another argument on why digital media will not be that easily "lost" if stored in the most commonly used digital format, see this older article by Simon Garfinkel, "The Myth of Doomed Data ".

from The Australian
British library starts email archive
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from Thirteen/WNET New York
New Public Television Partnership Receives Major Program Preservation Award from the Library of Congress
go to news release

It is always encouraging to learn of the launch of digital preservation projects, this time on either side of the Atlantic, pointing to an increasing awareness of such a need in our present-day technology-driven culture. Much of the effort in this area is presently led by government organisations, which is indicative of the resource-intensive nature of archiving the tremendous amount of digital content out there. However, the undoing of such digital preservation efforts might well be the other increasing trend of litigation based on a fallacious interpretation of the notion of "copyright". A good starting point in understanding this debate (from an American persepctive) would be Peter Hirtle's "Digital Preservation and Copyright".

from BBC News
Is music safe on compact disc?
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A pick up of a previous story on the same subject - but with a more populist implication in the sphere of personal music collections. If there is enough general concern, then it can only lead to a better understanding of the limitations of using optical storage media for data archiving purposes.

from BBC News
Effort to save UK's web heritage
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go to press release
go to web-site

Another effort in the string of projects to preserve digital culture and heritage.

from Wired News
CDs, DVDs: Human After All
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Digital preservation has some urgent work cut in determining the reliability of CDs and DVDs as storage media. Lost of digital information can result the physical deterioration of materials used in the making of these discs.

Some tips for safekeeping these optical storage media :

- use write-once-only discs (CD-Rs or DVD-Rs) rather than rewriteable ones (CD-RWs or DVD-RWs);
- do not use adhesive labels on discs;
- write on discs with water-based or alcohol-based pens;
- do not bend discs;
- handle discs by the edges only;
- do not stack, scratch the label side or cause discs to rub against each other;
- store discs vertically in good-fitting cases which do not have a gripping stud in the centre;
- store discs in a cool and dry place;
- and where possible, store in an oxygen-free environment to reduce risk of oxidation of the metallic (aluminum) layer

This is one clear example that digital preservation must also address the issue of preserving actual and tangible materials, in addition to virtual data or information.

from Neat New Stuff
Rare Books from the Missouri Botanical Gardens Library
go to web-site

Introduction from the web-site front page:
"This web site, presented by the Missouri Botanical Garden Library and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, features 46 digitized volumes from our Rare Book collection. Our goal is to digitize and preserve beautifully illustrated and botanically significant books in our private holdings in order to make them available to an international audience. This project will result in a large database of botanical and gardening illustrations and text available to scholars, gardeners, and book enthusiasts through this web site."

from BBC News
E-mail to art gallery in an instant
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The increasingly prevalant use of digital technology seems to trend towards a culture of impatience and impermanance. This might signal the end of the road for preservation and conservation of cultural heritage. Or does it?