Expressing Needs of Digital Audio-Visual Applications in Different Communities of Practice for Long-Term Preservation

Digital Preservation

The precious digital information stored in hard discs of research organisations throughout the world is becoming inaccessible rapidly. Moreover analog information is also digitized on the same pace. So it is necessary to make this information available in accessible and usable form for future generations. According to an International Data Corporation study for 2007, 264 exabytes of data were created. In future this data would grow at 57% annual growth rate, faster than expected growth rate of storage capacity. (Jelitto, 2010) So, most of this data would be preserved. Digital preservation should address changes that certainly occur in hardware or software, in organisational or legal environments. It must contain metadata or representation information for interpretation of original information and easy retrieval of information.

ALA (2007, p. 1) defines Digital preservation as combination of policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content over time. The goal of digital preservation is to preserve materials resulting from digital reformatting, and particularly information that is born-digital with no analog counterpart. Because of the relatively short lifecycle of digital information, preservation is an ongoing process. (Tessella, 2013) It is necessary to know the importance of preservation of information. There are three categories for which we need to preserve data. First to maintain Regulations i.e. the time retention set by national and international regulatory bodies to keep information. Second, Legal defence that includes defend or prosecute against any legal action. Final, Knowledge re-uses that deals with preserving the information for future researchers. (Tilbury, 2010)

The main purpose of preservation lies with the rapidly changing technology that is making recording systems and formats obsolete. The loss of original content during the process of migration between two platforms is another issue. Even now transfer of videos to DVD is considered a preservation measure. Preserving a file includes data integrity checking, refreshing of data and migration of data to new preservation platforms in time to avoid loss of information through obsolescence. The community is aware that digitization is necessary for future but has less knowledge on how to digitize with archival standards. The organisations policy aims to create and use the AV collections but not to preserve them.