Library and information science(s) or studies (LIS) is an interdisciplinary field of study that deals generally with organization, access, collection, and protection/regulation of information, whether in physical or digital forms. In spite of various trends to merge the two fields, some consider the two original disciplines, library science and information science, to be separate. However, it is common today to use the terms synonymously or to drop the term "library" and to speak about information departments or I-schools.
Archival science, or archival studies, is the study and theory of building and curating archives, which are collections of documents, recordings and data storage devices. To build and curate an archive, one must acquire and evaluate recorded materials, and be able to access them later. To this end, archival science seeks to improve methods for appraising, storing, preserving, and cataloging recorded materials. An archival record preserves data that is not intended to change.
In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies, and it combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and "born-digital" content, regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time.
The term born-digital refers to materials that originate in a digital form. This is in contrast to digital reformatting, through which analog materials become digital, as in the case of files created by scanning physical paper records. It is most often used in relation to digital libraries and the issues that go along with said organizations, such as digital preservation and intellectual property. However, as technologies have advanced and spread, the concept of being born-digital has also been discussed in relation to personal consumer-based sectors, with the rise of e-books and evolving digital music.
Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection, and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains, and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. Enterprises are starting to use digital curation to improve the quality of information and data within their operational and strategic processes.
An archivist is an information professional who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, maintains control over, and provides access to records and archives determined to have long-term value. The records maintained by an archivist can consist of a variety of forms, including letters, diaries, logs, other personal documents, government documents, sound and/or picture recordings, digital files, or other physical objects.
Digital artifactual value, a preservation term, is the intrinsic value of a digital object, rather than the informational content of the object. Though standards are lacking, born-digital objects and digital representations of physical objects may have a value attributed to them as artifacts. With respect to analog or non-digital materials, artifacts are determined to have singular research or archival value if they possess qualities and characteristics that make them the only acceptable form for long-term preservation.
Disaster preparedness in museums, galleries, libraries, archives and private collections, involves any actions taken to plan for, prevent, respond or recover from natural disasters and other events that can cause damage or loss to cultural property. 'Disasters' in this context may include large-scale natural events such as earthquakes, flooding or bushfire, as well as human-caused events such as theft and vandalism.
Collections management involves the development, storage, and preservation of cultural property, as well as objects of contemporary culture (including contemporary art, literature, technology, and documents) in museums, libraries, archives and private collections. The primary goal of collections management is to meet the needs of the individual collector or collecting institution's mission statement , while also ensuring the long-term safety and sustainability of the cultural objects within the collector's care.
In archival science and archive administration, appraisal is a process usually conducted by members of the record-holding institution (often professional archivists) in which a body of records is examined to determine its value for that institution. It also involves determining how long this value will last. The activity is one of the central tasks of an archivist, to determine the archival value of specific records. When it occurs prior to acquisition, the appraisal process involves assessing records for inclusion in the archives.
