ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces digital preservation standards and practices established in the libraries and archives community and presents their relevance to the care of audiovisual heritage and time-based media art collections. Collection stewards begin the process of digital preservation by investigating the past or history of data in their possession, documenting that information to make certain it is available to future users indefinitely. This background information creates context and makes data more meaningful, helping future users understand how a file was created, how it was used, and who used it. Preservationists also document information about the file in its present state. The Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) model has a “particular focus on digital information,” both in terms of the data contained in a package and method of description, but is not restricted to the virtual world and can be applied to physical collections, as well.
