Business archives and digital images: preservation issues versos getting the job out

Abstract

Every day the Walt Disney Photo Library fulfils photography requests. Analogue delivery is falling away and digital files are replacing them. Where images historically were delivered into the collection as photographic media, there will be a time in the near future where the collection will arrive in digital format. The short term is easily accommodated; a digital asset is filed in a hard drive and put on to a Zip or CDROM. It is the long-term issue of archiving the digital assets that looms ominously overhead, waiting to strike the collection down with one small change in format or hardware.

Can you read the word-processing files you created just 6–10 years ago? Does the computer you bought just 4 years ago get the job done? Does the image you put put on a CD or sent through e-mail to the client necessarily display as intended? What happens when you are on a different version of the software than the client? What happens when the industry standards change and built-in backward compatibility is not on their agenda? CD-ROMs may last as long as the 100 years intended, but will there be the software to read them? Does the archivist in charge of digital image archiving favour migration or emulation for saving their information? How can archivists, the minders of history, dictate the importance of their task to the image science indusry?

Keywords:

• business archives
• digital images