Lecture 01
Why is digital preservation so difficult?
by David Giaretta (STFC - Oxford, UK)
The objective of preservation is not only to transmit our heritage to future generations, but above all to maintain the capability to understand and reuse what we have preserved.
The peculiar characteristics of digital objects imply several difficulties in their preservation.
Even if it is obviously necessary to preserve the bits, this is not enough since more information, at many different levels (e.g. the format in which they are encoded, the semantics necessary for their intelligibility, the rights which are on them, etc.) is required in order to reach the ability to maintain and reuse these objects.
Moreover, digital preservation undergoes several threats which are related to financial and legal aspects, technological obsolescence, changes in environment and in the people knowledge base, trustworthiness of repositories.
The CASPAR project, involving an extremely wide range of disciplines and taking the OAIS conceptual model as its base, has tried to find both theoretical and practical solutions to these threats by defining principles and concepts, and by developing tools and methodologies. Even if it has not found all the answers, it has reached satisfactory results.
This presentation explains the risks and the solutions proposed by CASPAR, paying attention to some important concepts, e.g. that fundamental of Representation Information, and outlines the course of the work done and its future proposals.
