Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Network access is the natural assumption but in principle other methods of
obtaining information from a given address/location would suffice, for example
fax or horse-back rider.
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Some kind of computers
Perhaps not strictly necessary but this seems a sensible assumption given the
amount of calculation needed to do some of the most trivial operations, such as
displaying anything beyond simple ASCII text, or extracting information from
large datasets.
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People? Organisations?
Clearly neither the originators of the digital objects nor the initial host organ-
isations can be relied on to continue to exist. However if no people and no
organisations exist at all then perhaps digital preservation becomes a moot topic.
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Identifiers?
Some kind of identifier system is needed, but clearly we cannot assume that
any given URL, for example, will remain valid.
15.2 Summary
This short chapter provides a very brief introduction to what we need to think about
when we are planning to preserve digitally encoded information. Later chapters
discuss these topics in much more detail.
