Archiving has long been considered a passive process: put
the things you want to keep in a cool, dry place and forget about them until
needed. But in the digital era, in which photos, videos, documents and other
content are on hard drives, flash disks or on servers in ‘the cloud’ rather
than in boxes in a cellar, archiving requires a much more active approach.
EU-funded researchers are addressing the problem.
Everybody in one way or another is an archivist. Companies
and public administrations need to keep records going back years, media
organisations have photos and videos they want to store and reuse, museums try
to archive all manner of content for posterity, and almost everyone these days
has large personal collections of multimedia content on their hard drive.