I gave a talk at ALA 2016, in Orlando, Florida, describing some of the approaches I’ve used in teaching digital preservation for libraries. My slides from the talk are posted here, and if the date is later than September 1, 2016 and you’re reading this, please do send me a reminder to post the edited transcript. (I’ve included the basic notes below, but it’s been a busy summer.)
My slides: Nadal-ALAAnnual16-DigPresEd
And an outline of the main points from the talk:
- Preservation requires intact Materials (Substrate; Media) and functional Rendering systems (Transport; Language).
- Materials are the core challenge for physical preservation; Rendering is the challenge for digital preservation.
- In evaluating any training or education prospect, as how it will help you learn to move data around (transport) or to make data usable (language).
- Computers are machines for performing binary logic operations, incidentally powered by electricity.
- If you can imagine a conditional series of events, a computer can execute it.
- Librarians have to describe the essential requirements and logical flow of systems.
- Developers refine our requirements and make a best-possible implementation at a given point in time with prevailing technology.
- Computers and programming happen in history and in the real world. Over time, we gain perspective on them just like any other information artifact.
- Preservation is a sustainable process, optimized over time. What you do correctly now, will be wrong later.