Digital archiving

Do digital files guarantee the sustainable preservation of the content they contain? Anyone who’s ever had a problem with a defective hard drive already knows that digital files can be susceptible to damage – even more so than analogue carriers. They can become corrupted or unreadable because of faults with the storage media, using the wrong software, or other unforeseen circumstances such as a fire or natural disaster.

Making a backup of the content is already a step in the right direction. But digital archives go a step further and need to ensure that we can preserve our partners’ audiovisual content unchanged indefinitely. And this in turn opens up new avenues for the content: we can manage and re-use it.

Infrastructure

Our infrastructure and processes for the sustainable preservation of content are structured in such a way that we can cope with various challenges. For example, to prevent data loss we store multiple copies of our partners’ content in different locations. We also set strict requirements for all our storage infrastructure components, and have processes in place to check existing files remain unchanged and are still readable.

Processes

But sustainable preservation goes further than this: we also set strict requirements for processes for importing and managing the content. We make sure it is verified before being imported in the meemoo archive system, where content partners can manage it and add metadata, so it can be used again in lots of different ways. Scalable processes for importing, exporting and managing content are all essential aspects of sustainable preservation. In consultation with our content partners and experts from the sector, we’re developing these processes and ensuring they’re configured and implemented correctly.

Dance is a living art, which is difficult to summarise in notation. That’s why it’s an absolute priority for us to archive our recordings correctly and sustainably. The specific expertise provided by meemoo, and the help they offer with the digitisation process, is invaluable for Rosas.

- Rosas Danse Company, content partner since 2016

Do you have a question?
Contact Matthias Priem
Manager Archiving