What to Preserve?: Significant Properties of Digital Objects

What to Preserve?: Significant Properties of Digital Objects

The importance of significant properties has been highlighted by a number of notable digital preservation initiatives in recent years. These include a range of projects funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the European Union, in which work has been undertaken to investigate the factors affecting decisions on significant properties, to establish generic models for determi...

What to preserve? Significant Properties of Digital Objects (Photographs)

Significant properties of digital objects: definitions, applications, implications (1)

Significant properties are those properties of digital objects that affect their quality, usability, rendering, and behaviour. In an ideal world, free from technical and economic constraints, libraries and archives would preserve their physical and digital collections in their original form with all significant properties intact. Resource constraints and technical limitations, however, often re...

The Digital Signature Dilemma: To Preserve or Not to Preserve

Since the mid-1990s, dozens of States, including those of the EU, have reformed their evidence laws so as to grant digital signature technologies the same proof value as handwritten signatures, as a mechanism for proving identity of authorship, consentement to obligations, and integrity of electronic records after their transmission across time and space. Yet, several archival institutions (inc...

Data without meaning: Establishing the significant properties of digital research

model for preserving “all the necessary properties of the data” (CEDARS Project, 2002). • Digital Preservation Testbed: Complementary research took place in the Dutch Digital Preservation Testbed Project (2000 – 2003) testing the viability of different preservation approaches for different types of government archival digital records. The research was based on the assumption that different type...