Digital Preservation

Question 1

What is Digital Preservation?

Answer 1

The preservation of artefacts in digital form, where an artefact can be electronic or not electronic

Question 2

What is a digital artefact?

Answer 2

A digital artefact is any type of item produced and stored as an electronic version

Question 3

What are advantages of Digital Preservation? (2)

Answer 3

• We can make perfect copies, a sequence of 1s and 0s will stay the same and an analogue copy degrades over time
• We can make multiple copies easily, and maintain the high quality for mass copying

Question 4

What are disadvantages of using digital artefacts for storage instead of storing physical copies? (3)

Answer 4

• Physical storage media such as HDD’s can decay and crash without notice.
• Using cloud storage relies on potentially unreliable third parties
• A storage media or the file formats of data may become obsolete

Question 5

What is the Domesday Book?

Answer 5

Compiled in 1086 in England for William I, and was a record of who owned all land in England before the Norman Conquest

Question 6

What is the Domesday Project?

Answer 6

A project undertaken on the 900th anniversary of the Domesday book, in which people took a survey of the UK similar to that of the book.

Question 7

Why is the Domesday Project an example of Digital Obsolescence? (3)

Answer 7

• The use of the LV-ROM format which has not been used since so can’t be read on modern machines
• Images were stored in analogue form so could not be used digitally
• Copyright issues concerning both the data and the software to run the system

Question 8

What is meant by ‘Digital Dark Age’?

Answer 8

The potential situation in which future generations will have little or no record of the 21st century due to the lack of digital preservation

Question 9

What is the ‘Wayback Machine’?

Answer 9

A digital archive of the World Wide Web which allows users to see archived versions of web pages across time

Question 10

What is ‘Web Crawling’?

Answer 10

A collection of programs or automated scripts which browse the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner

Question 11

In what ways can we keep old software running and accessible? (3)

Answer 11

• Restoring old machines or keeping older machines running (e.g PDP-1 at Computer History Museum)
• Rebuilding old machines (e.g Manchester Baby 1998)
• Emulating old software or hardware on new hardware

Question 12

What is Emulation?

Answer 12

The reproduction of a computers exact functionality on another computer

Question 13

What are some issues concerning the preservation of software such as games over time? (2)

Answer 13

• Legal problems involved in downloading old games onto new hardware
• Source code may not be preserved