Wither digital repositories?

A long time ago (2004 in fact) I was the digital asset management project manager for AIATSIS.

This was a really interesting project to procure and implement a digital asset management system, which bore a close resemblance to a digital repository to store for all time the digitised patrimony of the aboriginal cultures of Australia. Now, the Aboriginal cultures were oral culture and while poor in terms of physical cultural artefacts where immensely rich in terms of stories, songs, dance and the rest.

A long time ago (2004 in fact) I was the digital asset management project manager forAIATSIS.

This was a really interesting project to procure and implement a digital asset management system, which bore a close resemblance to a digital repository to store for all time the digitised patrimony of the aboriginal cultures of Australia. Now, the Aboriginal cultures were oral culture and while poor in terms of physical cultural artefacts where immensely rich in terms of stories, songs, dance and the rest.

As the traditional societies broke down during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there was great risk of loss of this material. Social dislocation, disruption, breakup of kinship groups etc etc.

However AIATSIS had built up a great store of anthropologists’ field notes, recordings on cassette and quarter inch tape, film, often 8mm or 16mm, and video.

Much of these materials were in a poor state as they had not been conserved at all – in one case a box of tapes was discovered in a tin shed on someone’s property after the original owner died. Being stored for forty years in a tin shed in the desert does not do anything for the longevity of quarter inch tape

Continues @ http://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com