title: NOTIONS OF VALUE IN DIGITAL OBJECTS: A debate with myself and others
creators: Michael Popham
abstract: The world of digital preservation and archiving has drawn heavily on the thinking of our analogue predecessors. When it comes to selecting materials, we are familiar with the idea of appraisal: “the process of determining whether records and other materials have permanent (archival) value” [1]. Typically, the notion of “value” is then further refined into broad sub-genres, such as evidential, informational, intrinsic, contextual, and so forth [2]. At iPres 2022, a panel session and related poster examined the problem of “The Value of Catastrophic Data Loss” but the debate repeatedly returned to measuring this value purely in terms of economic costs. This paper unpicks the notion of value further, and offers some reflections on how these ideas might apply to digital materials and be predicated on the essential differences between analog and digital sources.
keywords: appraisal value cost