Duurzame toegankelijkheid volgens IT-bedrijven

Planets presenteerde eerder deze week een "white paper" (waarom heet dit eigenlijk Wit Papier?) waarin beschreven wordt hoe 18 IT-bedrijven kijken naar duurzame toegankelijkheid. Om mij onduidelijke redenen wordt in het rapport nog al geheimzinnig gedaan over welke bedrijven aan het onderzoek hebben meegewerkt.
De uitkomsten zijn in veel gevallen voor de hand liggend:

• The digital preservation market is still in its infancy; there is plenty of potential for growth as it affects all business sectors.
• Currently, engagement is led by the memory institutions2 at national and international level. Engagement is also high in government and research organisations and emerging in the private sector.
• Legal obligation is the key driver for organisations to engage in digitalpreservation, although additional motivations vary by sector.
• Although digital preservation is business critical, many organisations do not have a policy to cover it. Where policies exist, their comprehensiveness is variable.
• There is a lack of information on the costs of digital preservation and its benefits (both tangible and intangible) which makes it hard to put together a convincing business case.
• Budgets for digital preservation are generally short-term and tend to be project-based.
• There is a perceived immediate need to preserve documents, images, audio,websites, video, spreadsheets and emails.
• Migration is strongly preferred to emulation to preserve digital material. However, this may change as emulation has a distinct role to play and there is some interest in emulation tools amongst the briefings’ participants.
• Participants thought that the most important factors for a digital preservation solution are that it should: maintain authenticity, reliability and integrity, adhere to metadata standards, and check records have not been damaged.
• Scalability of digital preservation solutions to high volumes of content and high ingest rates are regarded as important but scalability of access is not yet important.
• While attendees thought standards are important in digital preservation, particularly OAIS and ISAD(G), they also thought that there are currently too many standards.
• There is still a need for guidance (particularly training), exchange of best practice, and awareness-raising through conferences and workshops.
• There is confusion as to what is meant by digital preservation. The difference between passive (storing multiple backups of data) and active (using migration or emulation to provide access to obsolete formats) preservation needs to be clarified. It should be emphasised that only active preservation can ensure that digital material can be accessed in the future.

In het rapport wordt ook een opsomming gegeven van marktsectoren waar duurzame digitale toegankelijkheid groeiende is. Eentje is in deze tijd een beetje cynisch:

The oil industry, which is looking for possibilities to reanalyse old seismographic data in search of new oil and gas reserves.

 Plaatje: Sorted White Paper Pile van Walter Parenteau