Tuesday, January 8, 2013

What is digital preservation?

As noted in the previous post, we will talk in this blog of everything that is involved and digital preservation. There are many definitions of digital preservation and online surely you find many of them.

However I give you a sample: Digital preservation manages how to archive documents, in this case digital documents over time. This means that it purposes to preserve digital documents to be read in the future. All of this may be complicated but is rather simple. Suppose you have an electronic document on a computer Amstrad 64

This computer is a little bit old, you need to turn it on and access to information. If you look at the image above on the link you may see that it has a cassette. This cassette cannot be read in a normal cassette reader, this cassette is encoded and therefore your document too. 

The problem is that this document will need to be upgraded to a new platform, because the computer Amstrad CPC 64 is not commercially (only in second hand) available and hard to find replacements.

If you have the cassette with the information, but does not have the computer, you can use a technique. If you have a computer, you can use another technique. 

Option 1: I have the cassette with information and do not know how to open it. Well, we have a problem. Need Amstrad emulator that can read the cassette. An emulator is a software that allows you to see an old document in a new one. 

Option 2: Has your computer. Great!. The best thing to do is boot up your computer and open information. Here the problem will be how to get information to pass from one place to another. Note that you will be able to access that information in the future. So start with the technical name migration. Migration is transforming a document from an old computer to a new one. This is the idea, not the exact definition, but it's the idea.

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