Digital dark age insurance? Associated Press (AP) team up with Preservica

The line between what’s history and what’s journalism is fine and fluid, says Valerie Komor. The AP’s approach: Save it all.

Valerie Komor, ‎Director of Associated Press Corporate Archives talks to aNewdomain about the challenges of preserving and safeguarding AP's vast collection of important digital news content for the future.

The digital age hasn’t been kind to us would-be historians. Thanks to space constraints, many of the images included in our stories were never saved — and then there’s the issue of material that’s never been in paper form being saved at all or not being accessible any longer if they were. That’s why the Associated Press has worked out a deal with digital preservation firm Preservica to save its corporate records, which includes reporters notes, images, videos and all the historical wire feeds and new versions of feeds that the AP makes available as news breaks to newsrooms around the world.

With digital-only records, “a number of things can go wrong,” AP’s director of corporate archives Valerie Komor told me. “The playback media becomes obsolete, you no longer have the disc, for example, or the software you need to view it .. or the file format becomes obsolete.....click here to read on