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Preservation Rumination: Digital Preservation and the Unfamiliar Future

Pricilla Caplan

Assistant Director for Digital Library Services
Florida Center for Library Automation

16 February 2005

9:30-11:00 am
Presentation and Q&A

11:00-11:30 am
Reception

OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
Kilgour Auditorium
6565 Frantz Road
Dublin, OH 43017-3395

It is tempting to think of the preservation of digital materials as an extension of paper or analog preservation. In some cases this can be counter-productive. Digital preservation poses problems that challenge our assumptions, among them the problem of abundance, the problem of ephemerality, and the problem of authenticity.

This presentation will review the basics of digital preservation, explore some of the problems that make it so difficult, and outline some requirements for digital preservation repositories. In addition, it will show how some of these theoretical requirements have been implemented in DAITSS, a preservation repository application under development at the Florida Center for Library Automation. FCLA provides centralized automation services for the libraries of the eleven public universities of Florida, and is implementing the FCLA Digital Archive as a central service using DAITSS software.

Priscilla Caplan is Assistant Director for Digital Library Services at the Florida Center for Library Automation, where she is managing the project to build the FCLA Digital Archive. Previously, Ms. Caplan was the Assistant Director for Library Systems at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians and numerous articles on metadata, reference linking, digital libraries and digital preservation. Currently, Ms. Caplan co-chairs the OCLC/RLG Working Group on Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) with Rebecca Guenther.

Background information

Presentation resources

PDF version of the original announcement