Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Digital preservation consists of the processes aimed at ensuring the contin-ued accessibility of digital materials. ... To achieve this requires digital objects to be understood and managed at four levels: as physical phenomena; as logical encodings; as conceptual objects that have meaning to humans; and as sets of essential elements that must be preserved in order to offer fu-ture users the essence of [each] object.

Digital technology ... has spawned a surfeit of information that is extremely fragile, inherently impermanent, and difficult to assess for long-term value. ... [I]t is increasingly difficult for libraries to identify what is of value, to acquire it, and to ensure its longevity over time.

You know, Phaedrus, that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive: but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words: they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you the same thing again and again.

Like chessmen, the symbols of pure mathematics stand not, or not necessar-ily, for anything denoted by them, but primarily for the use that can be made of them according to known rules. The mathematical symbol embodies the conception of its operability, just as a bishop or a knight in chess embodiesthe conception of the moves of which it is capable.

There seems to be a sense that digital information needs to be held to a higher standard for authenticity and integrity than printed information. ... This distrust of the immaterial world ... has forced us to ... examine defini-tions of authenticity and integrity—definitions that we have historically been rather glib about—using ... verifiable proofs as a benchmark. ... It is much easier to devise abstract definitions than testable ones.

All scientific statements are structure statements.

All documents to be shared must conform to widely known structural schema. Information protocol and representation standards are also criti-cal. Many such standards are used to facilitate interchange between oth-erwise autonomous individuals and agencies. However, having too many standards can present more difficulties than having too few. For in-stance, the National Alliance for Health Information Technology identifies more than 450 mandatory and voluntary standards, more than 200 organi-zations with standards working groups, and more than 900 standards publications!

Digital preservation can be accomplished with no more than small extensions over information interchange and digital library (DL) technologies that are already widely deployed. Most of the software technology needed is already available, or soon will be, and is being standardized. This includes cryptographic tools for sealing information against surreptitious change, encoding rules for multimedia (e.g., MPEG) and for scientific data, XML syntax for packaging digital objects, and semantic models encoded as sets of triplets.

For the first thirty years of digital preservation, archives managed their digi-tal collections with ... a simple storage system and ... a catalog database. Although the fundamental design of a digital archive system has remained the same ... a contemporary digital archive needs more than [storage] for magnetic tapes and a [database] for the catalog. The rapid growth of digital material in both volume and complexity [and] rising expectations of ar-chives users ... have all contributed to the redefinition of digital archive functions.

Truth is embedded in the symbols and artifacts that we create and then keep by choice or by accident. And yet, as we approach the end of the twentieth century, we find ourselves confronting ... a vast void of knowledge filled by myth and speculation. Information in digital form—the evidence of the world we live in—is more fragile than the fragments of papyrus found bur-ied with the Pharaohs.