T revor O wens . The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation

The fabled allure of the archives continues to tug powerfully at historians, yet too often the behind-the-scenes contributions that archivists make to this seduction get short shrift. Trevor Owens’s award-winning new book, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, may change that. Neither a how-to manual nor a theoretical tract, the book pragmatically delivers a bit of both to guide readers through baseline concepts and considerations involved in undertaking a digital preservation project. Owens has a broad audience in mind, from the individual scholar assembling a personal archive with a digital camera or document scanner to institutions large and small. But Owens also delivers much more; as he unpacks a fascinating array of real-world examples, from Carl Sagan’s floppy disks to online communities and massively multiplayer games, he defamiliarizes the digital objects that we increasingly engage with, and invites us to reconsider their natures and possibilities through fresh eyes....

Art · Art history · Craft · Media studies · Sociology · Visual arts · Computer Science · Digital and Traditional Archives Management