Preservation of SIDAM Images
As memes are added to our collection, we must consider how these born-digital images can be preserved over time. Although the physicality of other collections often greatly hinders their preservation, our images can be downloaded and perpetuated millions of times over without disintegration. However, the fact that these images are digital presents other challenges. The most significant of these challenges include the accessibility of images over time with changing technologies, storage and formats of images on data servers, long term maintenance of metadata for images, and the preservation of technological context and environment of digital image.
Accessibility Over Time
Ideally, all of these images will be stored on SIDAM server for access via the web. Due to the continual addition of memes in our culture, we must consider the continual addition of file space over time. By being selective and only choosing successful memes that are still images, we hope to have a reasonable amount of memes stored on the servers of the Culture Consortium of America, the national organization for the preservation and storage of culturally significant born digital items. We will most likely employ Fedora as the underlying system to store our content metadata, as their software has nominal support and an active community working to resolve the issues presented with born-digital items and their preservation over time.
Sources
- Brown, Adrian. (2008). "Selecting file formats for long-term preservation". The National Archives. Retrieved December 1, 2012 from www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/selecting-file-formats.pdf
- "Choosing a file format for digital still images". JISC Digital Media. Retrieved September 30, 2012 from http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/stillimages/advice/choosing-a-file-format-for-digital-still-images
- Chowdhury, Gobinda.(2010),"From digital libraries to digital preservation research: the importance of users and context", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 66 Iss: 2 pp. 207 - 223.
- Fanning, B. (2006). Image File Format Standards. Aiim E-Doc, 20(1), 12-13.
- JPEG homepage. (2007). Retrieved November 20, 2012, from http://www.jpeg.org/jpeg/index.html
- Fedora 3.5 Documentation (2011). Retrieved December 5 2012, from https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA35/Fedora+3.5+Documentation
Image Formatting
To fully consider the long term storage of born-digital images, SIDAM must consider overall systems of support for selected image formats. Currently, we are using open standards of JPEG,Joint Photographic Experts Group, and TIFF, Tagged Image File Format. These standards have developed methods to link and deliver necessary image metadata when accessed by the user. TIFF, along with the possibilities of specific metadata fields about provenance and technical data, can be edited and saved multiple times without the loss of image quality. Portable Network Graphics, PNG, has also become one of the more accepted formats for image retrieval. Like TIFF, this format is an open standard that aims for lossless compression. For our users, flexibility and ease of use for each image is essential.

Metadata Support
As mentioned in our Organization section, we will be employing Dublin Core metadata standards to our collection. After slightly altering core elements to fit our images, we will also use Fedora through the management system interface to establish relationships of description with our images. Additionally, we are exploring the need to build a digital ontology to better represent digital information in context. This ontology would essentially assist in the construction of semantic, temporal and, in our case, cultural meanings as users access each digital image. We will provide examples of the actual memes to users, but the image without text will need some further context to be recognized as a meme. This will be done through the addition of complex and appropriate embedded metadata, in the form of tags, dates, times, etc., to provide further accurate representations of culturally significant images over time.
