Many of our readers may remember a unique blog post written by our former intern, Tess Webre. Tess took a very creative, educational approach to the subject of digital preservation and created Snow Byte and the Seven Formats, A Digital Preservation Fairy Tale.
This post turned out to be so popular (see the many comments), and, it had such visual appeal, that we were inspired to turn it into a video. So, here it is – Snow Byte and the Seven Formats, A Digital Preservation Fairy Tale, the video!
Snow Byte may have a tongue-in-cheek children’s book style, but the idea behind it is to illustrate the overall importance of digital preservation. Hopefully, this technology-oriented “fairy tale” will appeal to young people, as an entertaining way to learn about this topic. As Tess mentioned in her earlier post, children are learning about digital material at a younger and younger age. So this story idea came about as an answer to the question, “what’s a good way to teach them about this topic”?
In the NDIIPP program, we are faced with the same question all the time, but mainly for adults – how can we get more people to pay attention to the increasing problem of digital loss? Since “Snow Byte” also includes such concepts as “metadata schema” and “proprietary file formats”, and highlights the issue of file backup, it could also appeal to library professionals or anyone else looking for a gentle introduction to digital preservation. In other words, Snow Byte is a fairy tale for all ages.
In case you were wondering who does the voices in the video, no, we didn’t happen to have a bona fide theater troupe available. However, this project brought out some otherwise hidden theatrical talent among the staff, who were brought together for this video as the “NDIIPP Radio Players”.
Does Snow Byte manage to evade the evil queen, and retrieve her magic spell? How does Snow Byte avoid digital disaster in the end? And who is this fellow, “Dublin”? Watch the video and find out. And, enjoy!
See “Snow Byte” and our other videos on digital preservation related topics on our video page.