Digital Preservation

Received a link to this through the JISC Records Management list. It questions the thinking around what should be preserved when considering digital objects. It's a question that we still need to get around to answering at the BBC, but my thinking is increasingly in line with Dr James Currall's when he talks about the importance of preserving the information but not fetishising the container. While there is a degree to which we want to look at digital objects as artefacts, given the amount of information we need to manage, I don't see that it is even remotely possible to consider all digital objects as artefacts. Rather it is better to retain enough to be able to recreate a picture of how we used information, but to the extent that we can recreate how we used every single piece of information.