Trevor Owens

As a solo archivist at a small graduate school, digital preservation is always a lurking background anxiety. Owens' marvelous book gave me the confidence I need to tie what I already know about physical preservation, description, and access and apply it to an ever-changing digital world. And the cool thing is that this book is not just for librarians, archivists, and other cultural heritage professions. While the text is certainly anchored there, Owens provides a map for IT folks, administrators, hobbyists, and just regular people who are interested in how digital preservation has worked in the past and how it might work in the future. Owens has a clear and easy to follow writing style and uses compelling case studies to illustrate his points. He has also somehow arrived at a magical book about digital preservation that isn't tied to a current technology platform and that won't be out of date in a matter of years. And that is hard to do! Best of all, he has a progressive and not-rose-colored view of the culture of libraries and archives and deftly links the world of digital preservation to issues of climate change, social justice, and neoliberalism. This is really a fantastic book and I'd recommend it to any curious reader (and if you are an archivist or an IT professional, buy this right now).… (mehr)