About
Welcome to the website for the book Partners for Preservation, a book discussing how to advance digital preservation through cross-community collaboration.
Edited by JEANNE KRAMER-SMYTH
With a foreword by NANCY MCGOVERN
The only certainty about technology is that it will change. The speed of that change, and the ever-increasing array of digital formats, tools and platforms, will present stark challenges to the long-term term preservation of digital records. Archivists frequently face shortfalls in the technical expertise, subject matter knowledge, time and resources needed to solve these challenges.
In this book, international contributors from diverse professions discuss their experience with and solutions to digital problems that share commonalities with those facing digital preservationists. Partners for Preservation advocates for archivists to recruit partners and learn lessons from other technical fields in order to work more effectively within the digital landscape.
Who could be partners to archivists working in digital preservation? This book will feature essays by eloquent representatives of various non-archives professions discussing their challenges with and victories over digital problems that share common issues with those facing digital preservationists.
‘This collection of writings by scholars in information science, computer science and law goes beyond making a case for collaboration in digital preservation with experts outside the GLAM community. It inspires records and archives professionals to think about their own concepts and principles from different perspectives; to develop a deeper understanding of the issues they encounter in their own work; and to be creative in the way they look at the material in their care. This is why it is a must-read for any professional who is responsible for the digital future.’
—Luciana Duranti, Professor of Archival Studies, The University of British Columbia
‘This work introduces a refreshing and much needed approach to digital preservation. It tackles the contemporary societal themes that are deeply ingrained in digital records making and use, and from those it invites digital archivists and preservationists to think through solutions. By addressing the immediacy, the urgency and the many unforeseen consequences of digital information, each chapter reminds us of the need to evolve in theory and in practice dynamically in relation to technological and social changes.’
—Maria Esteva, Data Curator, Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas at Austin