This reading is a fragment from Liviu Pop’s Ph.D. thesis on the digitization and long term digital preservation of the Folklore Archive of the Romanian Academy. Liviu Pop is currently an Assistant Researcher at the Institute of Folklore of the Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. His research interests are long term preservation of digital content, digitization, archive studies, the relations between analog and digital technologies, metadata handling, analog-digital conversion, media archaeology, cultural heritage, archive databases, and folklore archives. Liviu, I think I recall your deadline for submission is approaching. Noroc!
Excerpt
We could ask ourselves which form of memory preservation will win the battle with time, what is the best way to maintain the memory in the long term. !e modern technology is – apparently – the right answer. But at a closer look, we notice that the answer is not so easy: paper, the original support for documents can last for at least 500 years,15 while the digital technologies are in a constant change, created for short term use and with a low lifespan. Paper is more suitable for the long term preservation of memory, while the digital technologies are working with a short term memory. Having a history of just a few decades, the digital technologies still have to find solutions for long term preservation.
Read Analog, Digital, Postdigital: On the Evolution of Documents here.
