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Abrams, Stephen

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Abrams

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Abrams, Stephen

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Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.f61cf9f3-6293-4249-a419-cfbaf3b50a1d

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    Publication
    Multivalent Evaluation of Digital Preservation Success
    (Emerald, 2025-04-23) Abrams, Stephen
    Purpose – Current assessment practice for digital preservation focuses on instrumental trustworthiness of processes, systems, and outputs, with insufficient regard for teleological success of resulting programmatic outcomes. This paper provides a communicological formalization of digital preservation success. Design/methodology/approach – Digital preservation is repositioned as semiotic sense-making unfolding across archival timespans and accompanying cultural as well as technical distance, and not just as persistent data management. Findings – Inherent intersubjective contingency of any use of preserved information objects necessitates multivalent consideration of various communicative qualities, experiential affordances, and artifactual characteristics for comprehensive determination of preservation success. Research limitations/implications – The proposed conceptual framework provides a foundation for subsequent development of evaluative best practice recommendations. Originality/value – While digital preservation concerns span a socio-technic continuum, evaluative practice should properly emphasize the embodied experience of preservation-enabled communication. Communicological framing of preservation assessment complements the predictive reliability of programmatic trustworthiness with confirmatory assurance of experiential efficacy.
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    Rethinking Digital Preservation: Conceptual Foundations
    (2023-09-20) Abrams, Stephen
    In support of a multi-year initiative to revitalize its core digital preservation infrastructure, the Harvard Library is engaged in an open-ended exploration of an ideal system solution. The individual components of that ideal cohere into abstract functional and informational reference models, which act as aspirational benchmarks for requirements and subsequent procurement and deployment activities. The models are derived through the logical refinement of a small set of high-level axiomatic principles. These reflect a conceptualization of digital preservation as an inherently communicative enterprise with an ultimate goal of complementing the persistence of authentic digital information objects with that of opportunities for legitimate information experiences.