Preserving and sharing born-digital and hybrid objects from and across the National Collection

This report is one of a set of outputs from the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project ‘Preserving and sharing born-digital and hybrid objects from and across the National Collection’. It has been designed to provide an extensive account of the project research activities and findings, to be useful to museum, heritage, and preservation professionals, as well as to scholars interested in born-digital materials. The aims of the project were to instigate a conversation and build confidence across the museum sector to support the collecting of born-digital objects, and to lay the foundations for future research in the field. The research gathers the expertise of professionals from different backgrounds, and has an international ambition; however, institutions addressing this type of collections tend to be concentrated in a few countries across Europe, Australia and North America. The research’s methodology includes: desk-based research, the focused investigation of four case studies, interviews and workshops. The analysis of the data collected has supported the articulation of a set of themes and key ideas that provide the grounding for the expression of policy, research and practice-related recommendations. The report understands the challenges of collecting born-digital objects as going beyond the mere technical realm of obsolescence and broken dependencies, to address issues of legality, visibility and accountability. It discusses the multi-layered and complex authorship of many born-digital objects associated with communities or corporate ownership, and expands on the potential of collaborative approaches to collection stewardship

207.1 Fencing Apparently Infinite Objects.

Todays digital preservation practice focuses mostly on fixed or complete objects, which are defined by their manifestation as files or records with the assumption that if one has the file(s) at hand, the preservation or curational effort can be focused on the local content only. With increasing importance of networked objects or software, object boundaries appear increasingly “blurry”: for instance, many software applications are staged to look and be- have like locally running binaries, when in fact an orchestration of networked processes is required for their operation. To cope with apparently infinite objects and their increasing complexity, this paper explores an expanded definition of object boundaries for performative objects

Fencing Apparently Infinite Objects: iPres 2018 - Boston

Todays digital preservation practice focuses mostly on fixed or complete objects, which are defined by their manifestation as files or records with the assumption that if one has the file(s) at hand, the preservation or curational effort can be focused on the local content only. With increasing importance of networked objects or software, object boundaries appear increasingly “blurry”: for instance, many software applications are staged to look and be- have like locally running binaries, when in fact an orchestration of networked processes is required for their operation. To cope with apparently infinite objects and their increasing complexity, this paper explores an expanded definition of object boundaries for performative objects