Archiving in the digital world: the scholarly literature

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this article is an ethnographic description of a particular slice of the digital archiving scholarship. The point is to get a sense of where the library and information science profession is today in dealing with the issues of long‐term digital archiving. Design/methodology/approach The methodology comes from cultural anthropology. It looks at a particular virtual place (ProQuest's Library and Information Science Abstracts database), a particular time period (2000‐2012) and a particular set of authors writing about digital archiving. Findings The topics of migration, emulation, integrity, authenticity, LOCKSS and Portico have limited resonance among the authors in LISA in the last dozen years. Articles about repositories and metadata are more common. Technical topics in digital archiving may be better suited to a computer science database, though this is surprising considering how information science borders on computer science. LISA remains, at least as far as digital archiving is concerned, strongly library oriented. Practical implications The digital archiving community that LISA reflects and represents is a community with a concern about the long‐term future, but one that has not come to terms with the core technical issues necessary to enable content to survive in a useful form over long periods. Originality/value This paper investigates the issues of long‐term digital archiving from the perspective of the library and information science profession by examining a particular database, time period and set of authors on the topic.

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