Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 8
Preservation of Intelligibility of Digital Objects
Co-authors Yannis Tzitzikas, Yannis Marketakis,
and Vassilis Christophides
Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two
things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite
intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.
(
Arnold J. Toynbee
)
This whole chapter is rather technical and may be omitted by those
without a technical background.
8.1 On Digital Objects and Dependencies
We live in a digital world. Everyone nowadays works and communicates using
computers. We communicate digitally using e-mails and voice platforms, watch
photographs in digital form, use computers for complex computations and experi-
ments. Moreover information that previously existed in analogue form (i.e. in paper)
is now digitized. The amount of digital objects that libraries and archives maintain
constantly increases. It is therefore urgent to ensure that these digital objects will
remain functional, usable and intelligible in the future. But what should we preserve
and how? To address this question we first summarise the discussion in previous
Chapters about what a digital object is.
A Digital object is an object composed of a set of bit sequences. At the bit stream
layer there is no qualitative difference between digital objects. However in upper
layers we can identify several types of digital objects. They can be classified to
simple or composite, static or dynamic, rendered or non-rendered etc. Since we are
interested in preserving the intelligibility of digital objects we introduce two other
broad categories based on the different interpretations of their content: exchange
objects and computational objects.
