THEATRE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
SYMPOSIUM
Towards a Digital Code of Hammurabi
Digital culture offers contradictory promises. While digital works can be ephemeral, they have the potential to last centuries. While digitization offers the promise of preserving nearly infinite amounts of materials translated into data, poor metadata can make much of that data impossible to find, rendering it useless.
Whether files are lost or found, preserved forever or die young, are retrievable or lost in a digital abyss, depends somewhat on technology, but more importantly on human action. To ensure that digital works created today will be accessible 4000 years in the future, a different mindset than occurs in traditional preservation project planning needs to be adopted. The keynote will compare similarities and differences between analog and digital preservation and access projects, and how creative solutions can present new opportunities for staff and users.
