Sustainable Archiving of Born Digital Cultural Content

Virtueel Platform, ?ISBN 978-94-90108-04-5?

chapters by Annet Dekker, Martine Neddam, Anne Laforet, Aymeric Mansoux, Marloes de Valk, Florian Cramer, Caitlin Jones, Gabriele Blome, Gaby Wijers, Lizzie Muller, Jeroen van Mastrigt, Maurits van der Graaf, Gerhard Nauta; published by Virtueel Platform. Read it online or download the PDF.

This is the printed outcome of the archive2020 conference held in Amsterdam in May 2009. It's not a "proceedings" book (even if there's a short report about the conference), but an edited anthology of texts, involving several tactical stakeholders with different experiences in archiving strategies of "born-digital" content. To stick with the reported definition, born-digital is "digital materials that are not intended to have an analogue equivalent, either as the originating source or as a result of conversion to analogue form." That means the most fragile cultural content, often at risk of a premature death because of various technical accidents or carelessness (including "natural processes" like technical obsolescence of the structure or hosting platform), that nevertheless represents more and more important chunks of knowledge and experience. It's an important anthology, then, with a few well known names involved in internet and media culture over the last couple of decades like Martine Neddam, Anne Laforet and Aymeric Mansoux, Florian Cramer, Caitlin Jones, and different experts involved with archiving issues in institutions. The book generates the feeling of wanting to move beyond what is already available on the net - a very sensitive issue - establishing what we think is worth protecting and preserving. This may lead to a sort of re-appropriating of online storage, enabling independent indexing and consequent searching for specific cultural sectors. The book (very recommended) is also available as a freely downloadable pdf.