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Strategic Thinking and Significant Characteristics

Strategic Thinking and Significant Characteristics. Hamish James. application. operating system. +. +. +. +. +. data. media. drive. computer. display. Recap: Complexity. Basic Preservation Strategies. Migration: convert the data to work with new applications

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Strategic Thinking and Significant Characteristics

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  1. Strategic Thinking and Significant Characteristics Hamish James

  2. application operating system + + + + + data media drive computer display Recap: Complexity

  3. Basic Preservation Strategies • Migration: convert the data to work with new applications • Emulation: convert the data, application (and operating system) to work on new hardware • Technology preservation: Keep everything running

  4. Newer Ideas • Virtual computing: create a standard ‘virtual’ runtime environment • Migration on demand: convert original format directly into up-to-date format

  5. In Theory Open Archival Information System

  6. In Practice • In practice, migration is the simplest and most common approach • Limitations of migration are: • Can be difficult to ensure accurate migration • Does not capture functionality, only (possibly partial) data • May need to be repeated frequently • Might lead to ‘mutation’ over time

  7. What to Preserve?

  8. Significant Characteristics • Very difficult to preserve everything (data, functionality and interaction) about a digital resource • Documented or commonly understood significant characteristics help simplify preservation actions

  9. Book Significant: Words, paragraphs, chapters, author, publication date, … Not Significant: Binding, print run, font, colour of paper, …

  10. Newspaper Significant: Words, paragraphs, headlines, size of type, date, page number of article, … Not Significant: Size of page, spacing, text justification, colour of paper, …

  11. Digital Resources • There is a shared understanding of what is important in a paper-based resource • Less agreement about what is important in a digital resource • Complicated to decide as software and formats support many options that are not knowingly used but have default settings

  12. Digital Examples

  13. Question • What are the significant characteristics of your digital outputs? • What are the digital objects that make up your resource? • What is the purpose of your digital resource?

  14. Digital Resources by Type • Textual Documents • Still Images • Moving Images • Audio files • Numeric dataset • Database • Markup Documents (XML etc.) • CAD • GIS • Virtual reality • Website • Software executable

  15. Digital Resources by Purpose • Original digital recording (audio, moving image etc.) • Digital surrogate of an analogue work (text, image, audio etc.) • Primary research data • Processed research data • Learning and teaching resource • Working paper, report or published paper • Catalogue • Computer model or simulation • Software product

  16. Summary • Think about the problem in terms of content and purpose • Very difficult (if not impossible) to ensure your resource stays exactly the same in the future • What can change without adverse effects? • What changes must be limited, and by how much? • How can you check changes are acceptable?

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