Preservation and the Impact of Nature, Politics, and War

Digital applications have continued to gain root in nature conservation, in both diversity and number. They progressively influence the way the public views, engages, and thinks about nature. Nevertheless, the rise of digital applications has led to the issue of digital preservation. The latter refers to the ongoing process of maintaining and creating the most viable environment possible for the use or storage of an artifact to mitigate its degradation or damage and to increase its lifespan for as long as possible. Digital preservation has some subdivisions at http://quality-essay.com/ such as restoration and conservation that entail precise treatments on an artifact to preserve and stabilize it for the future or to revive it to its initial state. One of the chief responsibilities, held by museums and libraries as well as other memory organizations, is that of cultural preservation. Digital libraries play a vital role in culture preservations and in the connectivity of people with their regional and national identities. The subject of digital preservation is specifically diverse in comparison to the traditional methods of preservation. Even though data preservation remains paramount today, an exploration of the vital principles for both the non-digital and digital platforms provides viable ways of data preservation and their impact of nature, politics, and war.

The Impact of War

Many researchers have recorded wide-ranging knowledge and information resources that have faced threats from human-meditated obliteration and natural disasters. Over the years, people have witnessed their historical artifacts and cultural heritage crowdsourced in digital museums. Moreover, nature, politics, and war are the leading enemies of written works. Many institutions, mandated to preserve digital data, have undergone threats of survival. Thus, various archives, such as the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium collapsed due to scandals and a pecking order, enticed by modern-day social trends. During the First and Second Worlds War, precisely in 1914 and 1940, the museum burnt down. Thus, this catastrophic event involved the bombing and the destruction of 900 manuscripts and 230,000 books, of which 800 books dated back to the year 1500. Therefore, such tragic occurrences show that wars have a devastating effect on existing data and information because they lead to its massive destruction, and it would take too long to recover it.

The Impact of Nature

With the unpredictability of changes in nature, various natural occurrences have caused loss of human life and the destruction of property. Overtime, earthquakes and tsunamis have led to mass destructions, for example, during the recent disasters such as the South Asia earthquake, the New Orleans disaster, and the Great Asian Earthquake and tsunami. Furthermore, such disasters have had devastating effects on people, libraries, museums, and archives in numerous countries. Preservation of data in regards to the impact of nature focuses on the effects of natural disasters in connection with privacy protection and the management of personal information. Governments should develop thoroughly monitored data protection laws to facilitate the ways of managing extreme natural disasters with effective disaster responses.

Governments have to manage their civil defense programs effectively as a way of disaster protection while reviewing previously applied lessons after disastrous events. Thus, some researchers state that personal information of disaster victims should remain confidential; therefore, governments should consider special protection of the same. In the United States, one of the organizations mandated to enhance privacy impact assessments is the US Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). Therefore, since many countries have suffered from various natural disasters that have led to death of people, dilapidated economies, and unemployment, their governments and its local institutions should work hard on protecting vital unpreserved information from loss.

The Impact of Politics

Politics can have a devastating effect on preservation. Thus, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s destroyed cultural institutions in the entire country. Books from the National Library were burned, and only less than 20% of them survived the damage, which was a huge blow and detriment to the rich cultural heritage of Cambodia. Such occurrences have left deep wounds to the culture, and it would take many decades or even centuries to heal. Political instabilities in many countries have been a direct threat to cultural legacies, printed on the acidic paper. Thus, people have focused on extensive microfilming of millions of pages of documents to ensure that the content of books and other printed sources is preserved. Therefore, data preservation methods should take note of the negative political aspect of various regimes so that people could find ways of maintaining their cultural practices.

The Place of War, Nature, and Politics in Preserving Data

Culture is in a relentless jeopardy and the digital platform, to a certain degree, may aggravate this risk through the maintenance of resources in formats that might be problematic for long-term retrieval and storage. However, a digital library is a very robust way of maintaining culture through the mitigation of its loss and diffusion. Thus, digital libraries are the fundamental tools, through which citizens can link with their ancient language, culture, and history. In a deeper perspective, they also serve as a platform to preserve and restore the immense value of lost or endangered artifacts that are too feeble to be stored in museums. Hence, digital platforms will be extremely helpful in the preservation of culture.

At the same time, the digital revolution is not always associated with positive attributes. The Gutenberg printing revolution helped to alleviate Europe from the Dark Ages of the knowledge loss in regards to the ancient Romans and Greeks. Therefore, the digital revolution may cause more harm than good if people fail to take stringent preservation measures. In essence, with the constantly changing information on the internet, attention should shift towards the preservation of original data. Details are usually stored in private communications that might reveal much from the past via design or accident, but this information is never available for the public as public documents. While telephone and telegraph have eroded expostulatory communications, the emergence of text messaging and email has culminated to less and less written products. Thus, written communication faces the risk of destruction or deletion. In addition, the problem with data storage will arise in such a way that people will tend to store excess data, which could lead to problems of data organization and the problems pertaining to the handling of big useless data.

The publishing of materials is a viable mode of preserving digital information. Materials published online can originate from professional sources such as libraries or publishing companies. The analogue versions exist elsewhere, and even if their digitalized replica disappear from the web, the printed texts will continue to exist. However, the question that arises is in regards to other forms of digital documents. Through the years, ephemera, such as advertisements, playbills, broadsheets, theater tickets, and menus, have survived. Even though their survival has been indiscriminate, the scholars state that such data is now stored after collection, valued and conserved as an imperative witness to social, economic, private, and political aspects of the past. Therefore, the use of digital documents will be vital in ensuring the preservation of digital information for a very long time.

Any culture relies on the quality of its knowledge. For society to trace its historical significance, the quality of knowledge of the past is paramount. A falsified past, whether accidental or deliberate, will culminate into the damage of society. A prime example is the Soviet Union that regularly rewrote its history to reflect on its existing political mores, which led to the destruction of valuable evidence in the process. When there is no adequate care in the preservation of a country’s digital present and past, this will definitely culminate into the impoverished digital future. Moreover, there is a new form of digital obsolescence. There has been a rapid growth or technology, which has mitigated the time for a certain technology to become archaic. In comparison to their analogue counterparts, digital resources are unstable, which tarnishes the authenticity and integrity of digital cultural resources.

Currently, institutions and individuals constantly produce digital data in large scales because of the rapid advancement of technology. Most data in the modern-day world comes from digitized programs; however, the vast majority of digital content is born to live and die in only their intrinsic digital format. Therefore, the preservation of cultural resources in a digital format faces various challenges such as the preservation of data with integrity and the interpretation means of this data.

Digital libraries play a vital role in culture preservations, helping people to maintain their regional and national identities. Strategically, it is undeniable that to mitigate the stress upon the valued original, the created data must be preserved in such a way that it lasts for as long as possible. Hence, the intentions and processes for preservation must arise from an early decision, made by the parties responsible in the digital lifecycle. It is necessary to ensure that repeating the direct digitization from the original is eradicated or positively mitigated. There is no prediction on how future wars, politics, and nature changes will affect the preservation of data; however, measures have been taken where data is backed up numerous times in various locations. Thus, in case a disaster occurs in one region, data will not be completely lost. As technology becomes sophisticated, and so do the means of preserving data. In the future, technicians will take stringent measures to ensure that preserved data is always safe.