Implementing Preservation Strategies for Complex Multimedia Objects

Addressing the preservation and long-term access issues for digital resources is one of the key challenges facing informational organisations such as libraries, archives, cultural institutions and government agencies today. A number of major initiatives and projects have been established to investigate or develop strategies for preserving the burgeoning amounts of digital content being produced. To date, the alternative preservation approaches have been based on emulation, migration and metadata – or some combination of these. Most of the work has focussed on digital objects of a singular media type: text, HTML, images, video or audio and to date few usable tools have been developed to support or implement such strategies or policies. In this paper we consider the preservation of composite, mixed-media, objects, a rapidly growing class of resources. Using three exemplars of new media artwork as case studies, we describe the optimum preservation strategies that we have determined for each exemplar and the software tools that we have developed to support and implement those strategies.