Preservation strategies for mixed music : the long tail and the short tail

Abstract

I have recently argued (Boutard 201 9)that preservation of digital technologyin mixed music should build upon thework done for the past ten years indigital preservation in relation tocultural heritage institutions, namelylibraries, archives and museums(LAMs). From this premise, I havediscussed several hypotheticaldirections based on a broad and wide-ly discussed distinction between threelevels of preservation: bit-level preser-vation; logical-level preservation; andconceptual-level preservation. Thegoal of such a paper was to emphasizethe similarities in the management ofdigital objects among various culturalheritage institutions at each one ofthese levels, whether these institu-tions manage complex objects (e.g.museums), research data (e.g. aca-demic libraries), or more generic dig-ital artefacts (e.g. archives).The promotion of Findability, Acces-sibility, Interoperability, and Reusabil-ity (FAIR) as well as Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainabil-ity and Technology (TRUST) is now afairly widespread theme in researchdata management and digital archiv-ing (Wilkinson et al. 201 6; Lin et al.2020). These notions provide an over-arching frame for best practices ineach domain.Discussing these notions may entailshifting the discussion from similar-ities to differences between thepreservation of mixed music and thepreservation of digital collections,archives and new media art pieces. Inthis paper, I would like to point atthese differences and to continue thediscussion about the conceptual levelof preservation in relation to docu-mentation methods.