Digital Preservation begins… in Italy?

At the DELOS Summer School on Preservation in Digital Libraries, which so far more than lives up to my expectation that it will provide an excellent overview of current and emerging digital preservation research and practices.

A comforting thought for local government Archive Services from the presentations on day 1:

• that digital preservation is as much about organisational and cultural challenges as technical ones. Something we can all start to address – now.

And also a rather more concerning one:

• the emphasis in OAIS on serving a designated community, something which is in any case hard to determine for traditional record offices with geographically defined collection policies. Priscilla Caplan also points out that the OAIS requirement that material preserved in an archival system should remain understandable to that community has not usually been part of the mandate of ordinary libraries or archives.

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