How Important is Digital Preservation?

Since the delineation between “The Digital World” and “The World” becomes less clear on a daily basis, and advances in technology seem to happen twice as fast, what’s the importance of digital preservation?

So what if those text messages you sent last year are gone? Since nobody uses Lotus 1-2-3, MacPaint, or PageMaker any more, why should we care what happens to the files?

This discussion will look at a few aspects of digital preservation, and why it might be important. Some topics considered:

• The Digital Dark Age
• How to know what’s important
• The long tail of research
• Preservation for access
• Hardware/software emulation

Some more conversational fodder can be found here: www.youtube.com/user/wepreserve