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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
