Born-digital

Born-digital materials are documents, datasets, images, websites, and other objects that originate in electronic form rather than as digitised scans of analogue originals. They dominate contemporary cultural production and raise distinct preservation problems: fragile media, dependency on proprietary software, and massive volume.

Archival response

Archives invent appraisal rules for email and social media, capture websites via Web archiving, and package objects with metadata under models such as OAIS. Without active stewardship, born-digital records are prime candidates for Link rot and the rhetorical Digital dark age.

See also

• Digital preservation
• File format obsolescence
• Ephemera

Sources

• Society of American Archivists and peer guidance on born-digital collecting.
• Rewritten Foreverpedia overview.