Preservation and Forgetting: Friends or Foes?

Humans are very effective in remembering by abstraction, pattern exploitation, or contextualization. On the other hand, humans are also capable of forgetting irrelevant details, an important role in the human brain helping us to focus on relevant things instead of drowning in details by remembering everything. The research question that we address in this paper is: Can we learn from human remembering and forgetting in order to develop more advanced preservation technology? In particular, we aim at studying how a managed or controlled form of forgetting can play a role in digital preservation, including personal and organizational archives as well as collective memories. Our research goal is twofold: 1) to establish effective preservation for more concise and accessible digital memories, and 2) to enable the easier and wider adoption of preservation technology. The concept of managed forgetting is discussed in more detail in the research work of the European project ForgetIT, which investigates the proposed concept by mean of an integrated information and preservation management approach.