Part 2. Interviewees Information and Findings:

Interviewee One Name: Ong Kah Hong Age: 22 Occupation: Marketing Executive Studying Major: Media Innovation, Faculty of Creative Multimedia (Graduated) Interview Recording File Name: “Interviewee1.m4a” Results: - View towards digital preservation: ·         Have never heard of digital preservation. ·         Everything store in digital form, so that the next user can access it. ·         Should be accessible using any medium/platform. ·         Should preserve it in good quality. - Views on challenges of digital preservation: ·         Compare to preserving traditional/analogue item, preserving digital material is easier. ·         Preserving traditional material into digital form is difficult. ·         Said that it’s all about the time and effort used on digital preservation. - Views on digital dark ages: ·         People should do more back up such as making more system/platform to access those digital objects. - Expectation: ·         Video showing things to preserve, the process of preserving. ·         A website to talk about digital preservation. ·         Installation which involve interactivity.

Interviewee Two Name: Cheok Tuan Eng Age: 23 Occupation: Student Studying Major: Animation & Visual Effects, Faculty of Creative Multimedia Interview Recording File Name: “Interviewee2.m4a” Results: - View towards digital preservation: ·         Have never heard of digital preservation. ·         Not much view/opinion on digital preservation. - Views on challenges of digital preservation: ·         Think that copyright issue is the main challenge. ·         Not much view/opinion on challenges. ·         Not aware that media storage is fragile. ·         Feel that it’s not secure to store digital data due to data corrupted. - Views on digital dark ages: ·         Everyone is able to access the digital information. ·         No more restriction in accessing it. ·         No more privacy. - Expectation: ·         Preserving something important in digital form. ·         Data got corrupted. ·         Showing the insecure of digital preservation.

Interviewee Three Name: Gary Lim Teck Yi Age: 21 Occupation: Student Studying Major: Advertising Design, Faculty of Creative Multimedia Interview Recording File Name: “Interviewee3.m4a” Results: - View towards digital preservation: ·         Have never heard of digital preservation. ·         Preserving digital art and digital media. - Views on challenges of digital preservation: ·         As compare to preserving analogue item, digital preservation is harder as it needs a lot of man power. ·         Because of too much digital data have to preserve. ·         Preservation technique is hard. ·         Aware that the fragility of storage media, had just bought hard disk for back up purpose. - Views on digital dark ages: ·         Agree that preserving the digital objects now is important, as it will become the history in the future. ·         So that the future generation can access the digital information. ·         Preserve those digital media before it is corrupted. - Expectation: ·         A public event or campaign, telling people to do digital preservation. ·         With good strategy in promoting it. ·         Use music as the concept to introduce people about digital preservation. ·         Because teenagers did not listen to old music, use old music as the initial idea to develop the campaign.

Interviewee Four Name: Cham Yang Hui Age: 20 Occupation: Student Studying Major: Media Arts, Faculty of Creative Multimedia Interview Recording File Name: “Interviewee4.m4a” Results: - View towards digital preservation: ·         Heard of digital preservation during class. ·         Digital preservation is digital material saving in hard disk or computer. ·         Digital camera is like a kind of digital preservation. ·         Documentation of information in digital form, instead of analogue form is a kind of digital preservation. - Views on challenges of digital preservation: ·         Easy to preserve, but easy to lose the digital data as well. ·         Digital objects can be lost simply with a “delete” button. ·         Storage media is not secure, digital materials will get corrupted without notice. ·         Due to that, backup of digital materials is needed. And hence it used up the space of media storage. - Views on digital dark ages: ·         The old digital object is replaced by the new technology. ·         Old digital object did not preserve well and it is lost forever. - Expectation: ·         Having two computer transferring data to each other. ·         Let people to feel secure on saving the digital information in the media storage.

Interviewee Five Name: Tang Wai Yung Age: 22 Occupation: Student Studying Major: Interface Design, Faculty of Creative Multimedia Interview Recording File Name: “Interviewee5.m4a” Results: - View towards digital preservation: ·         Never heard of digital preservation. ·         Preserving the technology for future usage. ·         Not much view/opinion on digital preservation. - Views on challenges of digital preservation: ·         It is not easy because there is too much digital information to be preserved. ·         Select which digital objects to be preserve is the issue. ·         Aware that storage media is not secure. ·         Digital file get corrupted easily, will be affected by virus as well. ·         Making backup file to prevent corrupted. - Views on digital dark ages: ·         Everything will be in digital form in the future. - Expectation: ·         Some history that have not been preserved. ·         Preserve those digital heritages in digital form.

Part 2. Interview

Interview

One on one interview had been carried out in order to develop the idea and content of this project. The reason that one on one interview method is selected instead of survey form is that, I had make an assumption that the people have very limited knowledge on digital preservation, or maybe close to zero. If survey form method had been carried out, the results obtained would not be much helpful in idea and content development. One on one interview would be helpful as I would able to explain to them regarding digital preservation and hence able to get useful findings.

Target Interviewee:

FCM Student or People in Creative Field

The reason that this group of people is selected to become the interviewee is that art exhibition will be mostly visited by this group of people. It would be a better choice to interview them and understand their views on digital preservation.

Objectives of Interview:

·         To understand how much the people understand/know about digital preservation. ·         To know their views/opinion on digital preservation. ·         To get ideas on content development which will be useful in project execution.

Interview question will focusing on 4 main components:

·         What is Digital Preservation? ·         What are the Challenges? ·         Understanding on Digital Dark Ages ·         What expectation if it is an art project?

Interview flow is designed in a way such that it provides two possibilities answer options from the interviewee. Be it which answer options the interviewee gave and at the end of the interview, the objectives of survey would still be reached.

Reference for Part 1

Dempsey, L. & Lavoie, B. (2004). Thirteen Ways of Looking at…Digital Preservation. D-Lib Magazine, July/August.
   http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july04/lavoie/07lavoie.html

Kuny, T. (1997). A Digital Dark Ages? Challenges in the Preservation of Electronic Information. 63^rd IFLA Council and general Conference.

Hedstrom, M. (1998). Digital Preservation: A Time Bomb for Digital Libraries. Computers and the Humanities, 189-202.

Shing Chen, S. (2001). The Paradox of Digital Preservation, March, 24-28.

Lee, K.H., Lu, R., McCrary, V., Slattery, O. & Xiao, T. (2002). The State of Art and Practice in Digital Preservation. Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, 107, 93-106.

Part 1. Research Material: Challenges of Digital Preservation bringing forward into a Digital Dark Ages

Digital preservation does not only preserve the digital contents, in a sense that it actually preserves the culture, heritage and history. Public understand the important of our history and heritage and thus most of the heritage buildings are being well preserved. Public without realize that digital preservation is such important that it is closely related to our culture, heritage and history. If you had been wondered how digital contents nowadays are related to the history. Do not forget that the current will be the history in the future.

The purpose of preservation is to protect information of enduring value for access by present and future generations (Conway, 1990:206).

Monks and monasteries played a vital role in middle ages in preserving and distributing books, which provided much of our present knowledge of the ancient past and heritage. However, the historical record of text has been carried by librarians and archivists within private and public libraries nowadays. How we are to preserve the historic record in an electronic era where change and speed is valued more highly that conservation and longevity. We are moving into an era where much of what we know today, much of what is coded and written electronically, will be lost forever.

The following observations of our present environment showed that we are living in the midst of a digital dark age:

-          Enormous amounts of digital information are already lost forever. We are unable recreate a digital history because it was no archived properly, it is unable to access because the information is on out-dated word-processor files, and old database formats, or saved on readable media. Many large data-sets have been made obsolete by changing technologies, punch cards and 12’ floppy disks. -          Information technologies are essentially obsolete every 18 months. This represents a greater challenge than the deterioration of the physical medium. Many technologies often without backwards compatibility and ability to handle older technologies. -          There is a proliferation of document and media formats, each one potentially carrying their own hardware and software dependencies. Merely copying bits is not sufficient for preservation purposes; if the software for making sense of the bits is not available, then the information will be, for all practical purposes, lost. -          Financial resources available for libraries and archives continue to decrease, because not effectively made it into public policy. There is little enthusiasm for spending resources on preservation at the best of times and without a concerted effort to bring the issues into the public eye, the preservation of digital information will remain a cloistered issue. -          Increasingly restrictive intellectual property and licensing regimes will ensure that many materials never make it into library collections for preservation. Whether corporate owners will develop a public-spirited interest in providing this archival role for future generations and whether the resources will be accessible to the public. -          The Commission on Preservation and Access suggests that the first line of defense against the loss of valuable digital information rests with the creators, providers and owners of digital information. Preservation is a desktop issue, not merely an institutional one. -          The challenge in preserving electronic information is not primarily a technological one, it is a sociological one. Product obsolescence if often key to corporate survival in a competitive capitalist democracy.

Digital collections facilitate access, but do not facilitate preservation. Digital places greater emphasis on the here-and-now rather than the long-term, just-in-time information rather than just-in-case.

Part 1. Chosen Issue

Challenges of Digital Preservation

Challenges that faced by the libraries and archivists is the issue which I will be focus on. I could make an assumption that most of the people do not know that digital preservation will be that difficult. People would have thought that techniques on developing new technology grow in a rapid pace, in result the techniques and technology system on digital preservation would have happened at the same pace. In fact, it is the opposite way and digital preservation is still largely in experimental.

Challenge One: Being Able to Create Digital Contents Easier

Libraries and archives have served as the central institutional focus for preservation. Traditional materials are preserved in the form of paper, microform, photographic, and to a lesser degree audio-visual format. It took two centuries for the Library of Congress to acquire its 29 million books and 105 million other items: manuscripts, motion pictures, sound recordings, maps, print, and photographs.

Today it takes only 15 minutes for the world to produce and equal amount of information in digital form. With so many digital contents created every seconds and minutes, it brings the digital preservation to face with more different challenges.

Challenge Two: The Scale of Digital Content

Although computer storage is increasing in scale and its relative cost is decreasing constantly, the quantity of data and our ability to capture it with relative ease still matches or exceeds it in a number of areas. Some repositories still face significant challenges in developing and maintaining scaleable architectures and procedures to handle huge quantities of data generated from sources such as satellites or the web.

For example, the Library of Congress currently amassed 170 billion tweets between 2006 and 2010 totalling 133.2 terabytes and each Tweet is composed of 23 fields of metadata.

Challenge Three: Technologies for Mass Storage of Digital Information

The tow terms “mass storage” and “long term preservation” embody a contradiction in the current state of affairs of digital library development. New technologies for mass storage of digital information abound, yet the technologies and methods for long term preservation of the vast and growing store of digital information lag far behind.

Our ability to create, amass, and store digital materials far exceeds our current capacity to preserve even that small amount with continuing value.

Challenge Four: Digital Obsolescence

Unlike traditional analog objects such as books or photographs where the user has unmediated access to the content, a digital object always needs a software environment to render it. Physical storage media, data formats, hardware, and software all become obsolete over time, posing significant threats to the survival of the content.

“Digital materials are especially vulnerable to loss and destruction because they are stored on fragile magnetic and optical media that deteriorate rapidly and that can fail suddenly from exposure to heat, humidity, airborne contaminants, or faulty reading and writing devices.” (Hedstrom and Montgomery. 1998)

Although preservationists have been battling acid-based papers, thermo-fax, nitrate film, and other fragile media for decades, the threat posed by magnetic and optical media is qualitatively different.
These new recording media are vulnerable to deterioration and catastrophic loss. Making the time frame for decisions and actions to prevent loss a matter of years, not decades.

Challenge Five: Changes in Technology

“Unlike the situation that applies to books, digital archiving requires relatively frequent investments to overcome rapid obsolescence introduce by galloping technological change.” (Feeney. 1999)

Because digital material is machine dependent, it is not possible to access the information unless there is appropriate hardware and software. Rapidly changing technologies can hinder digital preservationists work and techniques due to outdated and antiquated machines or technology. This has become a common problem and one that is a constant worry for a digital archivist—how to prepare for the future.

A big problem faces by archivists in retrieval and playback technologies. Innovation in technology continues at a rapid pace. Recording and storing information are being replaced with new products and methods on a regular three to five years cycle.

Challenge Six: Absence of Established Standards

While preservation of traditional materials becomes more successful and systematic after libraries and archives integrated preservation into overall planning and resource allocation.

Digital preservation is constrained by the absence of established standards, protocols.

Digital preservation remains largely experimental and replete with the risks associated with untested methods. Digital preservation requirements have not been articulated from either the user perspective, nor have they been factored into the architecture, resource allocation, or planning for digital libraries.