JISC

Significant properties are essential characteristics of a digital object which must be preserved over time for the digital object to remain accessible and meaningful. Proper understanding of the significant properties of digital objects is critical to establish best practices and helps answer the fundamental question related to digital preservation: what to preserve?

The importance of significant properties has been highlighted by a number of notable digital preservation initiatives in recent years. These include a range of projects funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the European Union, in which work has been undertaken to investigate the factors affecting decisions on significant properties, to establish generic models for determining them, to develop tools and services for describing and extracting them, or simply to understand complex digital object types, using the concept of significant properties as a starting point.   

JISC, the British Library and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) are organising a joint workshop on 7 April 2008 at the British Library Conference Centre. The intention is to bring together the relevant projects and report on progress to date. It is also hoped that the workshop will lead to collective recommendations for future areas of research and development. The workshop should in addition further our understanding of and provide insight into a number of specific types of digital objects, including documents, images, software, scientific data, government records and e-learning objects.

 Who should attend?

Repository managers, librarians, archivists, information management specialists, software vendors, service providers
 

Benefits of Attendance

• An opportunity to input into future research and development in the area of significant properties
• To get up to speed with the outcomes from the major projects already working in this important area
• To gain an understanding of some of the issues and challenges when dealing with complex digital objects

 Full details of the programme and registration will be announced shortly on: http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/events/080407workshop.html