Preservation of Digital Assets

The amount of digital content published over the past ten years has grown exponentially. In order to ensure long-term access to this content publishers, libraries and institutional repositories work together to promote digital preservation to meet the needs of tomorrow's users. A model program in the US for digital preservation is a non-profit organization, Portico.

Portico is dedicated to the preservation of scholarly digital content. They define digital preservation as the following:

Digital preservation is defined as the series of management policies and activities necessary to ensure the enduring usability, authenticity, discoverability, and accessibility of content over the very long-term.

In contrast to the above definition of digital preservation, Portico also defines what is it not; short-term backup, byte replication and system redundancy. While these are important to any digital archive, a digital preservation program implements procedures and processes that ensure usability, authenticity, discoverability and accessibility for generation to come.

Revenue Growth through Innovation

Just like any industry, publishing has not been isolated from the pressures of the economy. We have all taken necessary steps to weather the economic storm including cutting back, but many organizations have taken the opportunity to innovate that will promote revenue growth. Many in the content industry have completely revamped product development plans and are revising strategies for a new age.

At the recent SIIA conference, Mark Logic's Matt Turner made predications of what he thinks 2010 will bring:

The rapid growth in eBook technologies and evaluations of print and online strategies are happening at a rapid pace. But strategies to move away from print are not straight forward. Kent Anderson on the Scholary Kitchen discussed how magazine publishers are spending huge dollars with an advertising blitz to promote their print at the expense of digital editions. This has been prompted by a slight increase in print advertising dollars recently. Kent says:

I can’t blame magazine business people for following the money, but perhaps they’re following it too closely and with an anachronistic mindset. There’s an argument to be made that the “uptick” these major magazines are seeing in advertising is just lost money looking for a home after it was orphaned when a host of other titles closed up shop. Basically, they’re sopping up the spills and thinking it’s free drinks for everyone.

This doesn't appear to be a trend but rather as Kent points out businesses following the money. At the same time everywhere we look innovation is being used to increase revenue growth and to strengthen the content industry. This can be seen in new models for electronic newspapers, a huge increase in eBook sales, and innovative hardware technologies like Apple's iPad making all of this possible.