Significant properties are essential characteristics of a digital object which must be preserved over time for the digital object to remain accessible and meaningful. Proper understanding of the significant properties of digital objects is critical to establish best practices and helps answer the fundamental question related to digital preservation: what to preserve?
The importance of significant properties has been highlighted by a number of notable digital preservation initiatives in recent years. These include a range of projects funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the European Union, in which work has been undertaken to investigate the factors affecting decisions on significant properties, to establish generic models for determining them, to develop tools and services for describing and extracting them, or simply to understand complex digital object types, using the concept of significant properties as a starting point.
JISC, the British Library and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) are organising a joint workshop on 7th April at the British Library Conference Centre. The intention is to bring together the relevant projects and report on progress to date.
 Neil Grindley (JISC) Welcome and introduction |
 Keynote Speaker Andrew Wilson (NAA) Presentation PDF 199KB |
 Stephen Grace (CeRch) INSPECT Project Presentation PDF 1.3MB |
 David Duce (OBU) JISC Study 1 - Vector Images Presentation PDF 1.6MB |
 Mike Stapleton, (SSL) JISC Study 2 - Moving Images Presentation PDF 561KB |
 Brian Matthews (STFC) JISC Study 3 - Software Presentation PDF 1.1MB |
 Richard Davis (ULCC) JISC Study 4 - e-Learning Objects Presentation PDF 1.0MB |
 Adrian Brown (PLANETS) Preservation Characterisation in PLANETS Presentation PDF 1.5MB |
 Roger Lloyd (Barclay Wealth) Industry / Media Presentation PDF 839KB |
 Colin Neilson (DCC) SCARP Project Presentation PDF 719KB |
 Stephen Rankin (on behalf of David Giaretta) (DCC) Digital Object Semantics Presentation PDF 453KB |
 Cal Lee (UNC Chapel Hill) SIGPROPS Presentation PDF 193KB |
Andrew Wilson (NAA) Comments/summary |
 Chair, Chris Rusbridge (DCC) Discussion |
 Frances Boyle (DPC) Closing Remarks |
Key to acronyms:
| JISC | Joint Information Systems Committee |
| NAA | National Archives of Australia |
| CeRch | Centre for e-Research , King's College London (incorporating the Arts & Humanities Data Service) |
| OBU | Oxford Brookes University |
| SSL | System Simulation Ltd. |
| STFC | Science and Technologies Facilities Council |
| ULCC | University of London Computing Centre |
| PLANETS | Preservation and Long Term Access Through Networked Services |
| TBC | To be confirmed |
| DCC | Digital Curation Centre |
| UNC | University of North Carolina |
| DPC | Digital Preservation Coalition |
Photographs
The Organisers
