There are at least three aspects of the preservation of digital material, and
the medium is the least of them (as Michael Lesk has written, in the future
preservation will mean copying, not maintenance of an artifact). Hilnet
notes the organization of the data (which I'm not sure is the same as
identifying it, as he suggests). There are two other aspects not there
noted:
a. Technology preservation: a shorthand term for the necessity to migrate
information through technologies, both hardware and software, so that it is
in fact usable in substantially the form it was created. This begs the
question of whether the information should be preserved in original form
along with its implementing technologies, or migrated through new
technologies as they occur. Jeff Rothenberg of CLIR (and Rand) has been
contracted to examine the possibility of resources carrying with them
sufficient description of their behavior such that exact replication of
original software/hardware isn't essential.
b. Intellectual preservation, or authenticity, or integrity: what is the
assurance that the digital information I am viewing is in fact what was
originally encoded/created? In the scholarly community this has to do with
preserving the research trail and the integrity of dialogue (my footnote
should stably refer to a text even if you change your mind), and in the
business community it has to do with integrity of transactions (when was this
lab notebook really created, when was this transaction authorized).
There are bibliographies on this stuff, some of which are noted in the
Time&Bits reading list. --pg
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