Mission
The fundamental challenge of digital preservation is to preserve the accessibility and authenticity of digital objects over time and domains, and across changing technical environments. This requires acceptance both of the inevitability of change, and of the inherent separation of the logical information object from its physical environment.
Approaches to digital preservation can be divided into those which are concerned with keeping the data useable over time (data-centric) and those which are concerned with keeping the software and/or hardware operational (process-centric). The current consensus is for data-centric approaches. For a data-centric approach, an understanding of the significant properties of digital objects is essential to ensure that the digital object remains accessible and meaningful.
An organisation with curatorial responsibility cannot preserve the authenticity of digital objects over time, or across transformation processes, unless it can identify, measure, and declare the specific properties on which that authenticity depends. Nor can it maintain access to those objects, unless it can characterise their current technical representations with sufficient detail.
The JISC-funded InSPECT project aims to:
- expand and articulate the concept of 'significant properties'
- determine sets of significant properties for a specified group of digital object types (raster images, emails, structured text, digital audio)
- evaluate methods for measuring these properties for a sample of representation formats
- investigate and test the mapping and comparison of these properties between different representation formats.
