Especially in times of reduced budgets, the growing need for storage becomes a problem for archival institutions. Even those who seem to have found effective storage solutions (like the Austrian Mediathek) have to face situations where there is not enough. When that happens, discussions about making compromises begin again, and always one of the first suggestions that arises is archiving in lossy formats.
Following the philosophy put forth in the IASA technical publication, TC 03 Safeguarding the Audio Heritage, we strive to digitize to the highest standard we can afford and avoid the risks associated with lossy or data-reduced formats. However, if the only choice is between digitization in lossy formats or nothing, then perhaps there are a few compromises which could be considered first.
In this workshop I would like to invite collegues from the archival community to brainstorm about those compromises and discuss this issue.
Agenda:
Are we talking about the same things?
Differences between „Storing“, „Archiving“ and „Longterm Preservation“
Concept of „Longterm Preservation“
How long is „Longterm“?
What are the expensive issues in dealing with storage?
What will probably become cheaper during time?
What could be postponed to later, better times?
What could be reduced?
Is storing in lossy formats the solution for our problems?
Calculation of storage with lossy format and lossless format
Calculation of collateral effects
Summary to include a group-produced, takeaway decision tree to help you face the problem.
