This plan was commissioned during the Spring of 2005 on behalf of the Conservation History Association of Texas (CHAT), a non-profit entity based in Austin, Texas. CHAT desired a comprehensive plan to ensure the long-term preservation of hundreds of hours worth of digital video and audio comprising the association's collected works. The plan includes a needs assessment and inventory of the assets in place and a review of the literature concerning digital media, storage hardware, software formats, and digital repositories.

"Celestial Jukebox" or Digital Dark Age?

A Question of Information Access

Technologies of access redefine the social and cultural aspects of information access. Areas directly affected by this shift include fair use of copyrighted works and the balance of control over statutory rights. Considered over the duration of copyright, the long-term effects of new access regimes could be more extreme. Assuming that technological controls prevail over the public interest in information access, several questions must be asked: Can public access be preserved as information becomes predominantly digital? If not, does our society face a scenario where knowledge and our collective cultural record will be preserved only to the extent that it is profitable?

New and disparate ways of digitally encoding texts were developed as computing became available to scholars of the humanities in the 1980s. The encoding of textual objects into a digital form creates opportunities for examining old and rare texts simultaneously and without the risk of wear or damage to the original object. Additionally, an encoded object permits new ways of interacting with the text, such as concurrent views of different versions and viewing subsequent editorial or annotations. The lack of standard methods for encoding and describing texts made it difficult for researchers to exchange objects and diminished the benefits that the digital format offers.