Significant Properties
Around 150 people came to an event at the British Library a few weeks ago (April 7th) to discuss current research into the ‘Significant Properties of Digital Objects’. Significant properties are essential attributes of a digital object which affect its appearance, behaviour, quality and usability, and which must be preserved over time for the digital object to remain accessible and meaningful.
This was an event organised by JISC, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the PLANETS project which is based at the British Library.
Frances Boyle (DPC) has written some useful notes on this event which are on the following JISC web page:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_preservation/2008sigpropswrkshp.aspx
By way of an addendum to those notes …
Towards the end of the discussion session (at the workshop) I invited delegates to consider what the ‘next steps’ should be in terms of commissioning new work in this area. One question to consider is: should JISC be seeking to fund more studies in a similar vein to the four featured at the workshop (on vector images, moving images, software and e-learning objects – i.e. continue investigating digital objects according to their type) or should JISC be looking to try and exploit the value of the work already done and commission some preservation / curation software tools that incorporate and use the concepts associated with significant properties?
I think it would be fair to say that delegates expressed support for both options but also gave the impression that there was still some groundwork to be done in really defining how the concept translates from the theoretical to the practical, and what it means to different users (or ‘designated communities’). I took the opportunity of repeating those questions at a meeting of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group last week and received some further useful input. Points were made about the potential role that significant properties work could and should play in the quality assessment of preservation-related work … and also in the authentication of digital objects - two important and under-researched areas. The point was also made that whilst the four JISC studies had all made important contributions to this research area (and in usefully different ways) they had all struggled with the concept and it might be fair to say that we still didn’t know whether information managers had anything yet that was of practical value to them in their work.
So … the next step is to organise a hands-on technical workshop where a small invited group of participants consider a range of files, define their significant properties, and then use that information to undertake practical preservation work. This doesn’t rule out more studies, or tools development, or a discipline-based approach, or indeed other ways of taking this work forward. It will simply provide a more practical foundation for further work.
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