Digital Curation: New Medium, Old Methods

Digital material is now ubiquitous and archivists are routinely expected to accession, manage and make available to readers, material which was born digital. Furthermore the results of: digitisation for online access; community archives projects; or oral history projects need to be administered by archives repositories. Being the custodians of digital materials is a new challenge for archives professionals. The new information technology focus requires a new skill set. However traditional archival theory still underpins archival activities in the digital paradigm. This presentation will look at the digital curation lifecycle and consider how core archival principles and processes, along with the policies which support them, remain relevant. It will align terminologies for the analogue and digital processes, identifying activities which remain unchanged, and try to demystify the discipline of digital preservation.