Tuesday 13 April 2010

Long term archiving of digital newspapers ...

As newspapers increasingly transit to becoming online news sources what then happens about their archiving as a historical record - especially as in the transition process there will inevitably be news publishers that fail, with the consequent risk of loss of content.

Newspapers provide a more interesting set of questions for any escrow service than academic journals as they are usually more content rich with images, embedded audio and video - take a look at the Guardian or the SMH if you don't believe me, and also reused and refactored content, for example the Guardian might have both a web version of the story an the text available in a G24 compilation for download and offline reading (the pre-iPad news digest if you will).

They are also documents whose structure implies things - simply archiving the individual items doesn't necessarily capture the whole story - the relationship between items can also form part of the story.

And of course it's not just newspapers - as academic discourse increasingly encompasses richer media, its something that will need to be addressed - for example INRAP's use of online video for archaeological site reports ...

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