Reassessing the Nature of Material Preservation in the Born-Digital Era

Born-digital materials are materials conceived and constructed solely in the digital realm. With a portion of the Information Science field still being informed by (if not actively still interacting with) prior analog-centric systems, contending with digital artifacts, especially ones that have already become outdated in the fast pace of technological evolution, remains a rich topic with unanswered questions. By exploring the potential issues with born-digital medias and their unique complications, particularly born-digital sound files, one can begin to sense how work with born-digital materials in the information sciences represents the ways in which creator and user habits have changed and points ahead to ways in which archivists will need to change.