Digital Preservation

Abstract

Conservation of collections has long been part of the traditional domain of museums. As creation of digital collections becomes prevalent, museums need to learn about the issues of conserving these new digitally created artifacts that are in fact digital surrogates of objects in their collections. These digital collections range from small, focused collections of digital images created specifically for a CD-ROM or Web-based Virtual Exhibition project to digitization of entire collections. Project planning for digitization should not only encompass the pre-digitization phases, but should also put in place plans for preserving these digital collections, once they are created. Various international organizations have looked at issues of digital preservation in the last few years. Few of the papers produced have directly examined the issues from the museum perspective.

This paper will consolidate the recommendations of past research papers in the context of digital artifacts in the museum environment. The paper will propose recommendations that take the theoretical issues raised in the past and propose a checklist, or prototype to allow museums to implement a preservation strategy.