Guidelines for a long-term preservation strategy for digital reproductions and metadata

The project Digitising Contemporary Art (DCA) is initiating a significant increase in the presence of contemporary art in Europeana, the single access point to Europe’s cultural heritage. Over 20 museums and art institutions will digitise approximately 30,000 contemporary artworks and contextual documents, making them available through the Europeana portal. Recently new good practice documents are added to the Digitising Contemporary Art project website.

In DCA the Netherlands Media Art Institute is workpackage leader 'long time preservation' and will research and publish standards, best practices and guidelines for a long time preservation strategy and their storage infrastructure. The first of these good practice documents is now published:

Guidelines for a long time preservation strategy for digital reproductions and metadata
Authors: Sofie Laier Henriksen, Wiel Seuskens & Gaby Wijers (NIMk)
External reviewer: Robert Gillesse (DEN)

These Guidelines for a long-term preservation strategy for digital reproductions and metadata explains how to preserve digital materials such as text, images and video. It gives a theoretical introduction to the subject as well as practical examples of how to manage a collection of digitized and born-digital artworks. Every institution with a digital repository should have a policy and plan to ensure access to content, not only today but also in the future. If digital preservation is not taken into account, the risk of loosing or changing data will become inevitable. Preservation should therefore be a part of digital collection management.

To access these documents see: http://www.dca-project.eu/deliverables