New session!

We are offering an additional session - to be notified in the conference programme this week.

Presenter will be Gary Elmes, General Manager - Systems Management at Datacom Systems Ltd.

Gary's topic will be:

The challenges of digital preservation

An ever-growing proportion of the cultural, social, and research artefacts generated by our society are being created in digital form. As the growing number of digital preservation and repository initiatives around the world attest, effectively preserving these digital artefacts for current and future generations is an important objective for archivists, librarians and historians.
But achieving effective preservation is a remarkably tricky task, at a number of levels. Compared to physical artefacts, digital items are being created at a truly massive rate, many of them only fleetingly and in very informal circumstances. Technology degradation (“bit rot”) and obsolescence continually threaten to destroy or render inaccessible stored artefacts. Copyrights can often complicate and limit our options on how we store and provide access to items. Creating appropriate “meta-data” to facilitate a useful means of finding artefacts is, especially for non-text items, problematic.

This presentation will explore some of these issues and look at the approaches and standards (such as OAIS) that are emerging to deal with them.