Long-time Preservation

Abstract

Our society produces more and more information every day and also tends to be increasingly dependent on it. Although some information is less/more costly to create or less/more relevant to our environment, some of it is definitely worth saving and may be of great value for next generations. Libraries (as well as similar institutions like archives) have the legal responsibility to safeguard long-term access to our scientific, social, and cultural heritage. The need for long-term preservation however is not necessarily limited to libraries and similar institutions, but is also relevant for governments, businesses, and even for individuals, e.g. in order to keep a photo album or important documents accessible for a longer period of time. Information artifacts can be both of analogue (e.g.: documents/photos/etc. on paper or microfilm) or digital (digital data stored on appropriate media) form with a clear increase of the latter and a decrease of the former. Over the last decades digitization of analogue assets started to play an increasingly important role over analogue preservation (paper, microfilm, etc.), among other reasons due to miniaturization and improved storage. Libraries have thus invested billions of Euros over the last decade(s) in the digitization of their assets. This chapter would not exist if digitization were be the final answer to all our preservation problems. One general drawback of digital long-term preservation is the fact that humans cannot directly understand bit-streams, whereas cave paintings – although thousands of years old – are still perceivable in the same manner (i.e. with the same sense organs). This can lead to a significantly different perception of the same digital asset in the future if rendered with a future application running on a future operating system with a future output device (that may possibly completely differ from today’s