The oxymoron of digital preservation

This story is making it around the interwebs/twitterverse today. Brainpicker, a wonderful blog, posted a story today about digital preservation in the film industry — “The future for digital storage is constant migration.”. While focusing on independent filmmakers and nonprofit archives, it’s worthwhile to do a find-and-replace “film” with “government documents” and “filmmakers” with “government information (nee documents) librarians.” Digital preservation takes collaboration and long-term vision. period!

“Most of the filmmakers surveyed…were not aware of the perishable nature of digital content or how short its unmanaged lifespan is.” After the Motion Picture Academy’s release last month of “The Digital Dilemma 2,” a warning aimed at independent filmmakers and nonprofit archives, cinematographer John Bailey talks with one of the report’s authors about the perils of data migration (“It’s not unreasonable to say that the term “digital preservation” is an oxymoron”) and the need to educate filmmakers who are so “enamored with the perceived benefits of digital image capture and workflow” that they fail to realize preservation concerns start to appear almost immediately after their work is completed. Film professor David Bordwell covers the report in a detailed post about preserving “born-digital” films, sixth in his “Pandora’s Digital Box” series about the worldwide conversion to digital projection, with lots of good links at the bottom.

[HT to Brainpicker!]

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