preservation Digital preservation involves the implementation of policies, strategies, and actions in order to ensure that digitized documents remain accurate and accessible over time. Due to emerging technologies, archives began to expand and require new forms of preservation. Archival collections spread to include new media such as microfilm, audiofiles, visualfiles, moving images, and digital documents. Many of these new types of media suffer from a shorter life expectancy than paper. With the quick advancement of our technological society, old media is becoming obsolete. Therefore, migration from old formats to new formats is necessary for the preservation of these digital medias so they can remain accurate and accessible. Metadata is an important part of digital preservation as it preserves the context, usage, and migration of a digital record. Similarly to traditional preservation, metadata is required to preserve the context, authenticity, and accessibility of a record. Information access Preserved materials in digital archives can be accessed usually by specifying their metadata, or by content-based search such as full text search when using dedicated information retrieval approaches. These usually return results ranked in terms of their relevance to user queries. Novel retrieval methods for document archives can also use other ranking factors such as contemporary relevance and temporal analogy or interestingness measure to determine the utility and relevance of results. Professional associations Professional archivist associations seek to foster study and professional development: Regional professional associations Smaller professional regional associations also provide more local professional development, such as: In 2002, the Society of American Archivists published guidelines for a graduate program in archival studies, but as of 2007 these guidelines have not been adopted by many universities. Practitioners of archival science might come from such academic backgrounds as library science, information science, history, or museology. See also References External links The Academy of Certified Archivists Archives and Records Association (UK & Ireland) Australian Society of Archivists The Society of American Archivists