Thoughts on "The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation" – ~ajroach42.com – I'm Andrew. I write about the past and future of tech, music, media, culture, art, and activism. This is my blog.
I just finished reading a book called “The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation”, by Trevor Owens. I’m going to take a few minutes to talk about what I thought about the book, and how it is influencing my approach to my own digital collections.
I’ve been getting up really early on Saturday mornings, grabbing a cup of coffee, and spending the whole day sitting by myself and reading. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep this up, but it has really helped me get through some of my non-fiction backlog, which was frankly starting to pile up. I recommend it, if you can pull it off.
Of course, there’s a lot more. It’s a book, this is a list of bullet points. Go read the book. I’m just summarizing some of the points that I want to discuss further.
That’s such a big question! With born digital objects, the answer varies from the “screen essentialist” answer ( ie “The finished, rendered file” ) to the slightly less obvious “every bit on the hard drive, even if it looks like garbage”, but it also includes the even less obvious “a video of the thing as it existed when it was popular” because, for the example of federated social network software Mastodon, or the computer game World of Warcraft, the parts of the object that might be significant can fairly far removed from the object itself. (What is WoW without servers and players? Do you just want to talk about the art? Are you talking about the community? What is significant to you? Allow that to inform how you undertake preservation.)
