...digital preservation is permanently cleaning up after the neo-liberal
economics of the 1990s.
...my sense of the challenges of digital preservation has changed over
time. I am more worried now by corporate abandonment, malicious deletion
and ill-managed encryption as long-term threats to our digital memory
than I was before.
...the Internet and its service providers don't replace intermediation
but have become intermediaries; ... libraries and archives are ... about
selection, authenticity and memory...
The value [of data] lies in re-use potential, and from this
qualification a digital preservation theme becomes apparent. Because if
you don't preserve it you can't re-use it. It's become fashionable to
talk of data 'going dark'. To extend the metaphor, digital preservation
offers perpetual daylight.
Obsolescence is neither spontaneous nor inevitable but in some small way
a choice that the markets made... Obsolescence is optional, and being a
choice exists only in contexts of negligence, failure or recklessness.
...there are competing narratives from left and right about the economy
based on presumed characteristics of data - frictionless, abundant,
additive, valuable, inexhaustible - which I don't fully recognise.
Digital preservation challenges these properties and by extension
challenges also the economics that assume them.
-- William
Kilbride.
"
No End of History"
Digital Preservation Coalition (15 June 2017).