Preserving and Maintaining Electronic Resources in the Visual Arts Or the Next Century

Seamus Ross

This paper discusses the need to preserve electronic resources for the long term future, in particular scholarly data in the Humanities and databanks of digital images. Not all digital resources are now duplicated by original hard copy and the labour and time involved in collecting and selecting these databanks may in many cases not be repeated. differing file formats, changing file formats and the need for agreed standards leads ' uncertainty about the long term preservation of such material. The paper draws attention to the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) in the UK, recently set up by the Joint Information Systems Committee DISC) of the Universities Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The AHDS has been set up to address the kind f issues which are discussed in this paper.