Digital cultural artifacts exist everywhere. Video games, cell phones, floppy disks, and DVRs (and even VCRs). Who has the specialized knowledge to retrieve and/or preserve this data? These are the questions asked and answered by digital archivists. These digital stewards of our past, present, and future may not be many, but they are mighty.

Ars Technica brought this topic to our attention in their article, “Digital archivists: technological custodians of human history.” Every business is dealing with data storage issues, but the urgent need is for more secure archives than a mix of external hard drives, cloud storage, and proprietary data tapes.

The important factor of digital archiving is consistency, and what provides consistency? Standards. Of course we are all about standards. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.