Preservation of digital memories

The contribution of term and concept

Abstract

Beyond the material dimension (physical support, encoding format, reading system), digital memories are preserved, if they are accessible. As a matter of fact, in today’s information world, to exist is to be  visible and accessible. How to represent information and render it in a readable format, but also how to organize and classify it, so that it is accessible? But also how and what to look for? How then to find it? These issues, all the more important than data, through the internet and beyond the barrier of languages and cultures, are more and more open and interlinked through multiple relationships in an inextricable web (open and linked data). Facing these issues, the “knowledge” of the domain, whether linguistic, through the terms used to describe digital memories, or conceptual, through the ideas that we have of them, appears as a panacea.