Long-term preservation and permanent access: How to ensure the long-term reuse value of your digital assets

Abstract

With awareness growing, research being funded and digital archives being set up, digital preservation has come to the foreground. The whole notion of software obsolescence and its consequences has, however, not yet caught the full attention and interest of commercial software developers. Their interest lies with the development of new, better and faster programs and that is how it should be. But slowly, new developments have started that will facilitate future preservation (for instance, the development of Open Office, Open Document and PDF7 as an ISO standard). Hopefully in the near future, durability will become an attractive and marketable value as well, and maybe then, DAM systems will offer preservation functionality as one of their basic features as well.