20 Years in Digital Preservation: 1998 presentation to the Society of Archivists annual conference, Sheffield UK

Preserving Digital Collections: current methods and research available now on Slideshare is the first of 12 conference presentations I have selected to mark 20 years in Digital Preservation. The remainder will be published at monthly intervals over 2015.

This is the earliest surviving presentation in my personal archive but it made the cut for selection because as far as I am aware, it presented the first advocacy of a lifecycle approach to digital preservation (as published in A Strategic Framework for Creating and Preserving Digital Resources).  As such it was an important influence and framework for Tony Hendley’s 1998 publication Comparison of Methods & Costs of Digital Preservation (and subsequent approaches to digital preservation lifecycle costs by the LIFE and KRDS projects) as well as later life-cycle approaches such as the DCC Curation Lifecyle Model.

An important component of the strategic framework was pre-emptive action prior to ingest – as reflected in the work on the digital collections policy and the “Guides to Good Practice” for data creators of the then recently established (but now ceased at least as an umbrella organisation) Arts and Humanities Data Service.

The presentation largely reflects the main sections of A Strategic Framework for Creating and Preserving Digital Resources study authored by myself (then responsible for Collection and Standards Development at the AHDS) and Dan Greenstein (then Director at AHDS). The study was part of a programme of digital preservation studies funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, following a workshop on the Long-term Preservation of Electronic Materials held at Warwick in November 1995.

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