Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Components of a preservation infrastructure themselves need to be preservable -
for example a Registry (see
Sect. 16.2.1.1
) which supports OAIS-type archives
must itself be an OAIS-type archive in that it must be relied upon to preserve its
(Representation) Information objects over the long term.
3.4 Disincentives Against Digital Preservation
It is important to realise that although many of those reading this topic will regard
preserving our digital heritage as self-evident, nevertheless this is not universal
opinion.
As time passes more and more digitally encoded information is accumulated. It
is therefore possible that the costs increase over time, yet experience tells us that the
budget available for a preservation organisation usually does not. Figure
3.8
might
therefore be projected to be the case.
If this is the projection then no responsible body would find it acceptable; a deci-
sion would have to be taken not to preserve everything - or perhaps not to preserve
anything. The focus here is on how we could try to control the costs so that either
the graph of preservation costs is level rather than increasing, or is increasing only
slowly so that the crossing-point is acceptably far into the future.
120
100
80
60
Budget available
Cost of preservation
40
20
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Fig. 3.8
Money disincentives - if the annual cost of preservation of the accumulated data increases
over time
