Abstract
In 2016 was started the CERN Digital Memory project with the main goal of preventing loss of historical content produced by the organisation. The first step of the project was targeted to address the risk of deterioration of the most vulnerable materials, mostly the multimedia assets created in analogue formats from 1954 to the late 1990’s, like still and moving images kept on magnetic carriers. In parallel was studied today’s best practices to guarantee a long life to digital content, either born digital or resulting from a digitization process. If traditional archives and libraries have grown up during centuries establishing recognized standards to deal with the preservation of printed content, the field of digital archiving is in its infancy. This paper shortly exposes the challenges when migrating hundreds of thousands of audio, slides, negatives, videotapes or films from the analogue to the digital era. It will then describe how a Digital Memory platform is being built, conform to the principles of the ISO-16363 digital object management norm that defines trustworthy digital repositories. Finally, as all information repository managers are faced with the necessary migration of underlying systems and the obsolescence of the information itself, the talk will explain how a digital archiving platform focusing only on content preservation could be of direct interest for most of the live systems.
Highlights
About four thousand years ago in Crete, a disc of clay was covered with hieroglyphs using 241 spiral-shaped signs printed with punches
With the advent of the digital age after the invention of the World Wide Web, it took less than 30 years to observe the speed of information obsolescence in parallel with the explosion in the amount of information
The relationship between a trusted digital archive (Open Archival Information System archive) and live digital information systems is equivalent to the classic relationship between an institutional paper archive and physical libraries
Summary
About four thousand years ago in Crete, a disc of clay was covered with hieroglyphs using 241 spiral-shaped signs printed with punches. This disc, known as the Disc of Phaistos, remains a riddle today: we know with certainty neither its meaning, nor its use, nor its place of manufacture. The obsolescence of information and information systems is not new and several similar examples illustrate the difficulties of transmission in the pre-digital world. Computer attacks and Human errors, not always immediately detected. Awareness of this phenomenon is increasingly shared. Vint Cerf, vice President of Google, warned against an "information black hole" and the need to create a "digital vellum" [3]
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