Tasks of Modern Digital Archives
There is an ongoing debate about the tasks of modern digital archives. On the one hand traditional archives were focusing on long-term preservation of physical objects and therefore had to restrict the access. On the other hand modern digital archives know that in general, copying can be done without loss of information1 which means that almost unlimited access can be given. In addition, web-based technologies allow users to not only access material, but also to enrich the content (commentary, corrections, extensions, relations, etc). To not affect the stored data, however, the enrichments have to be stored independently of the original data and new versions may not overwrite the older versions.
Due to these fundamental changes, the MPI archivists see it as their major task to take care of all three aspects
- taking care of long-term preservation
- giving access to the content to authorized persons via a set of methods
- allowing authorized persons to update and enrich the content
The digital archive at the MPI is seen as a living repository the
content of which is dynamically changing without that the original data
is being affected.
1) There may be loss of information when format conversion is being carried out, in particular for compressed audio/video formats.