Digital Records with Intrinsic Value

Question 1

What is…

Intrinsic Value in the context of Digital Records?

Answer 1

Value intrinsic to a record that cannot alone be captured through copying or transcription. According to the Society of American Archivists the value intrinsic to the record may come from: form, layout, materials, or process. It may also be based on an item’s direct relationship to a significant person, activity, event, organization, or place. Intrinsic value for digital records may be hard to define. This deck attempts to showcase important digital artefacts with intrinsic value.

Question 2

Chelsea Manning Wikileaks

Answer 2

• A number of cables and reports, as well as the air strike video “Collateral Murder”.
• Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks have highlighted injustices the American military are responsible for.
• Chelsea has served the longest time in prison than any previous whistle-blower.
• These digital originals are of vital significance and of crucial evidentiary nature of a watershed moment in the world’s recognition of whistle-blowers and their importance.
• The digital originals could well be recognised as having intrinsic value and need to be preserved as such.

Question 3

CERN Website

Answer 3

Last-modified date still listed as Thu, 03 Dec 1992 08:37:20 GMT,

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/ WWW/TheProject.html

A recreation (a public preservation effort) of CERN’s first website.

CERN was the centre of its genesis of the web through a proposal from Tim Berners-Lee’s lee in March 1989, when he submitted a paper to his boss titled, “Information Management: A Proposal”.

Question 4

Treaty Digitisation

Answer 4

• The Treaty of Waitangi is one of two UNESCO Memory of the World recognised documents held by Archives New Zealand.
• While digitization is not preservation in its own right, the treaty’s nine pages have previously been mistreated meaning today they are in much poorer state than they should be for 200 year old documents.
• Each new scan has its trade-offs but each new scan also helps conservators to see its state across time, and so it has its advantages too.
• There are currently two digitised sets of images preserved digitally in Rosetta at Archives NZ.

Question 5

Warhol Amiga 1000 Images

Answer 5

Discovered at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

The artist, Cory Arcangel. took an interest in a number of disks held by the institution.

Warhol was a spokesperson for the Amiga computer’s multimedia capabilities.

circa 1985

Created both public art (there is a video of him making a portrait of Debbie Harry) and digital art in private too.

The images were made in the software GraphiCraft, v27, release 86.