Towards Concise Preservation by Managed Forgetting: Research Issues and Case Study

In human memory, forgetting plays a crucial role for focusing on important things and neglecting irrelevant details. In digital memories, the idea of systematic forgetting has found little attention, so far. At first glance, forgetting seems to contradict the purpose of archival and preservation. However, we are currently facing a tremendous growth in volumes of digital content. Thus, it becomes ever more important to focus, while forgetting irrelevant details, redundancies and noise. This holds true for better organizing the information space as well as in preservation management for making and revisiting decisions on what to keep. Therefore, we propose the introduction of the concept ofmanaged forgetting as part of a joint information management and preservation management process in digital memories. Managed forgetting models resource selection as a function of attention and significance dynamics. Based on dynamic, multidimensional information value assessment it identifies information objects, e.g., documents or images of decreasing importance and/or topicality and triggers forgetting actions. Those actions include a variety of options, namely, aggregation and summarization, revised search and ranking behavior, elimination of redundancy, and finally, also deletion. In this paper, we present our vision for managed forgetting, discuss the challenges as well as our first ideas for its introduction, and present a case study for its motivation.