Kiss Your Assets Goodbye: Best Practices and Digital Archiving in the Publishing Industry

Kiss Your Assets Goodbye: Best Practices and Digital Archiving in the Publishing Industry

Archives

Focusing on the publishing industry, Victoria McCarger reveals the importance of archiving published articles and images for historical purposes. Print media documents history and McCarger challenges publishers in regards to their archival workflow. The author discusses how over time, items deemed archival with “no expiration date” are problematic in the scope of file formats provided over the last twenty five years: “different flavors of JPEG, competing vector software…Word files, PDFs, and now the explosion in audio and video formats” provide difficulty in management. “Worst” practices have organizations archiving everything because no formal policy over formats is in place. McCarger challenges the hierarchy of those responsible for digital preservation revealing that IT departments are responsible for hardware and software but for them the idea of preservation simply means, “back-up.” In her survey she reports that metadata standards of many organizations are not useful for future migrations therefore compromising long-term preservation. This essay is on the outskirts of scope of scholarly digital archiving but is necessary in documenting moments in history from a cultural standpoint as cultural heritage material. This type of information is crucial in the understanding of a specific time period in literary history by giving contextual documentation surrounding a subject.

McCargar, Victoria

2007-08-23

Elena Rogalle

Journal article

McCargar, Victoria. 2007. "Kiss Your Assets Goodbye: Best Practices and Digital Archiving In The Publishing Industry." Seybold Report: Analyzing Publishing Technologies 7(16), 5-7.