Preserving Complex Digital Objects

Citation

Ross Harvey (2015), "Preserving Complex Digital Objects", Library Management, Vol. 36 No. 6/7, pp. 550-551. https://doi.org/10.1108/LM-06-2015-0045

Preserving Complex Digital Objects is concerned with one of the greatest current challenges in digital preservation: how to maintain long-term access and usability of digital materials that are made up of multiple files and may change on a regular basis – in short, they are complex. A complex digital object is defined by the Digital Curation Centre as a discrete digital object made by combining a number of digital objects. We have decades of experience of preserving simple digital objects such as documents, images, and files in PDF formats, but that experience cannot be automatically applied to complex digital objects. The contributors to this book are concerned with a wide range of complex digital objects, including games, archaeological visualisations, 3D reconstructions, digital artworks, software, computing environments and visual film effects.

The 24 papers in this collection, plus a summary by the editors (co-leaders of the Future Proof Computing Group at the University of Portsmouth), are grouped in five sections, which indicate well the scope of the book: why and what to preserve: creativity vs preservation; the memory institution/data archival perspective; digital preservation approaches, practice and tools; case studies; and a legal perspective. The papers were initially presented at symposia held in 2011 and 2012, hosted by the Preservation of Complex Objects Symposia (POCOS) project. (A list of the papers can be found on the publishers’ web site.) They report on a wide range of research from Europe and the USA. The aim of the book was to present these papers to the public, with a set of “pathfinder solutions” drawn from them and from the symposia.

The credentials of the editors and the contributors are impressive; among them are some of the big names in digital preservation research, as well as artists, curators and digital humanities researchers. The range of their papers is similarly impressive, although some are overviews of their topic and are perhaps a little too basic (but nevertheless worthwhile) in comparison to other papers in this book. I was particularly stimulated by the case studies in Part 4, especially Daisy Abbotts “Preserving interaction”. Also noteworthy is an eight-page glossary which is of great assistance in the acronym-laden field of digital preservation. The final chapter, the editors “Pathfinder conclusions”, is to my mind the most exciting of a very satisfying collection, as it clearly articulates a research agenda for this field.

Preserving Complex Digital Objects is the only book I am aware of that attempts a state-of-the-art summary of this challenging yet essential field. It deserves handsomely the publishers’ description as a “ground-breaking collection”. It is an example of collaboration in practice, and we can only hope that the editors’ final recommendations are taken up and pursued by future collaborative research groups. It is well worth purchasing for anyone interested in digital preservation or digital humanities.