Tending the Garden or Harvesting the Fields: Digital Preservation and the UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage

The UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage, adopted in October 2003, is important for affirming the role of (national) heritage institutions and extending existing systems for preservation of documentary heritage to cover digital materials. This approach has distinct advantages, but has also been criticized for taking too narrow a view of the dynamic diversity of the digital environment, particularly as found on the Web. To understand what digital heritage is, it is useful to look at the current debate on preservation of intangible heritage, as both share a number of characteristics. The charter is examined in the context of UNESCO programs on culture to indicate its relevance for UNESCO’s mission and to point to political aspects of digital preservation that cannot be ignored. Brief History On October 17, 2003, the thirty-second session of the General Conference of UNESCO adopted a Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage, a milestone in a process that had started several years earlier and that continues to this day. The charter is one of the UNESCO activities for safeguarding the documentary heritage and is closely connected to the Memory of the World Programme, which aims to preserve and promote cultural heritage through digitization projects, the publication of guidelines, and the Memory of the World Register of well over a hundred works of exceptional importance. The UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage was a response to the concern voiced by memory institutions that digital materials (primarily those digitally born) will become inaccessible in the near Tending the Garden or Harvesting the Fields: Digital Preservation and the UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage