Preserving the Past: Digital Heritage

A talk providing insight into the work of the NLI’s Digital Collections team and the challenges posed in preserving and accessing types of media which have fallen out of common use.

In this talk, Kieran O'Leary will explore one of the most at-risk areas in cultural heritage collections around the world: digital materials stored on legacy media and in obsolete file formats. From floppy disks to optical media such as CDs and DVDs, many digital objects are becoming increasingly difficult to access as the hardware, software, and operating systems needed to extract and view their contents become harder to acquire and maintain.

This presentation will examine these risks and challenges, with examples of legacy hardware and media on display during the talk, and will provide a practical overview of the approaches adopted by the NLI and similar organisations around the world to preserve access to digital collections.

Delivered by Kieran O'Leary, Digital Repository Services Manager