Preservation strategies for mixed music: the long tail and the short tail

Abstract

I have recently argued (Boutard 201 9) that preservation of digital technology in mixed music should build upon the work done for the past ten years in digital preservation in relation to cultural heritage institutions, namely l ibraries, archives and museums (LAMs). From this premise, I have discussed several hypothetical directions based on a broad and widely discussed distinction between three levels of preservation: bit-level preservation; logical-level preservation; and conceptual-level preservation. The goal of such a paper was to emphasize the similarities in the management of digital objects among various cultural heritage institutions at each one of these levels, whether these institutions manage complex objects (e.g. museums), research data (e.g. academic l ibraries), or more generic digital artefacts (e.g. archives). The promotion of Findabil ity, Accessibil ity, Interoperabil ity, and Reusability (FAIR) as wel l as Transparency, Responsibil ity, User focus, Sustainability and Technology (TRUST) is now a fairly widespread theme in research data management and digital archiving (Wilkinson et al. 201 6; Lin et al. 2020). These notions provide an overarching frame for best practices in each domain. Discussing these notions may entail shifting the discussion from similarities to differences between the preservation ofmixed music and the preservation of digital col lections, archives and new media art pieces. In this paper, I would l ike to point at these differences and to continue the discussion about the conceptual level of preservation in relation to documentation methods.