Ripensare i formati, ripensare i metadati: prove “tecniche” di conservazione digitale

Abstract

Digital Revolution brings the most complex challenge of contemporaneity. Digital has transformed the way to produce, transmit, share and interact with knowledge. Rethinking digital and digitization as social and cultural expressions of the contemporary era becomes unavoidable. This implies the need to rethink digital data as cultural entities produced by societies, and no longer as mere tools for simplifying administrative management or as virtual surrogates of analog cultural heritage. It is urgent to undertake serious policies aimed at ensuring the data preservation not only in theri formal aspects, but above all in their structural and descriptive contents which qualify and identify their creative and evolutionary processes: we have to assess data in their new role as witnesses of our processes evolution and as memory to be transferred to the future. The present contribution aims at proposing a structural redefinition of digital data, with the goal to renew their function and role as cultural resources by which the future generation will know the processes of contemporary digital age, entrusting metadata with the function of primary sources of information and knowledge to read, study, share and reuse.