Proceedings of Media Production 2006. Berlin, 2007.

M. Klein, F. McCown, J.A. Smith, and M.L. Nelson.

To date, most of the focus regarding digital preservation has been on removing copies of the resources to be preserved from the “living web” and placing them in an archive for controlled curation. Once inside an archive, the resources are sub ject to careful processes of refreshing (making additional copies to new media) and migrating (conversion to new formats and applications). For small numbers of resources of known value, this is a practical and worthwhile approach to digital preservation. However, due to the infrastructure costs (storage, networks, machines) and more importantly the human management costs, this approach is unsuitable for web scale preservation. The result is that difficult decisions need to be made as to what is saved and what is not saved. We provide an overview of two of our ongoing research pro jects that focus using the “web infrastructure” to provide preservation capabilities for web pages. The common characteristic of the projects is they creatively employ the web infrastructure to provide shallow but broad preservation capability for all web pages. Both approaches are not intended to replace conventional archiving approaches, but rather they focus on providing at least some form of archival capability for the mass of web pages that may prove to have value in the future.

@INPROCEEDINGS{klein:preservation, author = {Martin Klein and Frank McCown and Joan A. Smith and Michael L. Nelson}, title = {How Much Preservation Do {I} Get If {I} Do Absolutely Nothing?}, year = {2007}, booktitle = {Proceedings of Media Production 2006}, publisher = {GITO-Verlag}, address = {Berlin, Germany} }