Principles for Digital Preservation

Principles for Digital Preservation

Archives

Gladney’s article discusses the issue of addressing user interests in digital preservation. He notes that much scholarship on digital preservation to date (at time of writing) focuses on the interests of artists and scholars but that the users of archived digital information are growing to include businesses as well. He explains that one of the major concerns of users of digital archives is that of the trust. While the literature suggests that focus should be on creating trusted repositories, Gladney argues that this assumes naivety on the part of the users. Instead of promoting trusted repositories, he suggests focusing on creating trustworthy information. He discusses the concepts of “original” vs. “authentic” data and suggests a method for ensuring authenticity of digital artifacts, which he calls the Trustworthy Digital Object (TDO) Methodology. This involves attaching metadata to files which describes identifiers, external references, certification keys, and version history. Finally, Gladney admits that since TDO has not yet been tested, it is premature to give “firm assertions’ of its advantages over alternatives, but claims that TDO represents a necessary change in focus from repository needs to user needs.

Gladney, H. M.

Communications of the ACM

2006

Polk, Victoria

Journal

http://mysite.pratt.edu/~croach/images/princip.pdf

Gladney, H. M. “Principles for Digital Preservation.” Communications of the ACM 49.2 (2006): 111-16. Accessed February 3, 2012. http://mysite.pratt.edu/~croach/images/princip.pdf