Digital History: Now and in the Future
The preservation of digital information presents challenges for society on many levels.Companies are faced with challege of keeping records in this era where information is increasing fluid, transient and emphemeral. Email, IM messages, audio/video meetings and webcasts. There is a explosion of digital bytes of information.
In the American History Reveiw, Roy Rozenweig's article, Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era uses the satiric Bert Is Evil web site as an example of complexity of perserving digital information. He asserts that
"historians need to be thinking simultaneously about how to research, write, and teach in a world of unheard-of historical abundance and how to avoid a future of record scarcity."
The sheer abundance of information will mean that researching exhaustive (reading everything) isn't a realistic strategy.
Related Works:
New Rules on Retaining Digital Business Documents by Ari Shapiro NPR Recording
Legal Deposit of Born Digital Materials and Web Sites
The Library and Archives Canada Act that received Royal Assent on April 22, 2004 gave new collecting powers to LAC with regard to Internet publications. It mandates LAC to acquire and hold in its collection Canadian Internet publications under Legal Deposit, and, for the purposes of preservation, it allows LAC to collect a representative sample of Canadian websites. As in the past, the LAC Act also stipulates that LAC is to appraise the records of the Government of Canada (GoC) and preserve those that are archival. This responsibility includes the archiving of GoC records in electronic format. [Digital Information at Library and Archives Canada]
