BSI wants comments on digital preservation standards
The British Standards Institution (BSI) has released a discussion draft of a standard of Bundles for the Perpetual Preservation of Electronic Documents and Associated Objects. The BSI is now also inviting constructive criticism and comments, especially from the international community. According to the BSI, museums are particularly concerned with long-term preservation of information in digital form. On the one hand, there is increasing pressure to digitise collections in order to extend "access" to on-line visitors. On the other, museums hesitate to invest resources to create information assets whose lifetime might be limited to the currency of the software and hardware used for their creation. Archives have a similar problem with their legacy collections, since the current documents they are required to collect for official archives are increasingly being created in electronic media. Universities and researchers are also interested in this issue. If future researchers are to be able to access historical research datasets, solutions to long term storage of digital assets must be found. BSI believes it is likely that projects addressing these problems will be eligible for funding under the European Community's Fifth Framework Programme.
Kraje
United Kingdom