Digital Preservation Q&A - Recent questions tagged terminology

When is "Preservation Format" a useful concept in digital preservation?

Tue, 18 Nov 2014 17:10:27 +0000

The concept of "preservation format" is a big part of discussion in some areas of work in digital preservation and not in others. I hear a good bit of discussion of "preservation formats" in terms of digital image & moving image formats for instance. However, other areas of digital preservation involve working with troves of heterogeneous material where the term doesn’t come up as much. For example, while Web Archives have WARC as a format, it's really a bundle of whatever the crawler hoovered up and bundled. Similarly, as more and more archives and manuscript collections focus on disk imaging they end up creating bundles of myriad digital formats.

So, is it that the concept of "preservation format" is useful in some areas but not in others? If so, what kind of principle separates the cases when it is from the cases when it isn't? Or, is it that the concept should either be used more broadly than it is or less so? That is, is the concept of a "preservation format" something that is universally relevant, relevant for some types of content or becoming irrelevant?

What is Preservation Planning?

Wed, 28 May 2014 19:22:12 +0000

Preservation planning is often a term encountered across the digital preservation community. But what exactly are we talking about when referring to 'Preservation Planning'?

Assuming that 'preservation' is a whole activity and preservation planning is part of that whole, how does this one constituant part fit in with the other parts? Can preservation planning be put into a simple diagram (such as the DCC life cylce Model)?

I'm looking for a really clear definition of what preservation planning is, it's impact, and the reasons to carry these activities out.

I'm really interested to learn how do you know when you are carrying out preservation planning, and how can others - my organisation - know when I'm doing preservation planning? How can I tell if the preservation planning I’m doing is effective. What processes/activities are part of preservation planning?

What is a file format?

Wed, 21 May 2014 18:34:47 +0000

Not to get too theoretical, but I think it is important to develop a common understanding of key concepts in the digital preservation field.

File formats are often discussed but there are varying ideas put forward to explain what they are/what the term means. This variance can cause confusion and make it difficult to agree on common processes and tools to use for digital preservation purposes.

Some sub-questions to help the discussion:

Is a file format a standard for use in formatting files?

Is a file format a common way of structuring the internal structure (format) of files?

Is a file format whatever The National Archive's DROID tool identifies?

Can the spread sheet files created by Microsoft Excel 2007 SP2 with an ODS extension be considered Open Document Spread sheet formatted files?

Can the (significantly different) spread sheet files created by OpenOffice 3.x with the ODS extension be considered Open Document Spread sheet formatted files?

Do we need multiple terms to refer to the various different types of concepts that we currently refer to as "file formats"

What is "Preservation Metadata"?

Wed, 14 May 2014 12:10:13 +0000

I often see 'preservation metadata' used in sentences which suggest it is distinct from other types of metadata, e.g. distinct from 'descriptive', 'structural', 'rights' or 'technical' metadata. However, it would seem that these "other" forms of metadata also have a part to play in preserving digital material, for example technical metadata about an image's dimensions could be used within Quality Assurance processes.

So, is 'preservation metadata' a distinct class/set of metadata? And if so, what does that set constitute?

Or should 'preservation metadata' be used to cover all metadata useful for preserving material, irrespective of whether it is 'descriptive', 'techincal', etc.?