Giulia Carla Rossi collects the fragile artefacts of our increasingly transient publishing world. She is a curator of digital publications at the British Library. As part of its Emerging Formats project, she works to preserve the new and often experimental ways in which people are telling stories across the web and other digital platforms, preserving the creations that are at risk of being left behind as technology races forward.
It’s perhaps a testament to the originality of the project that there’s no single, casual term for the works that you’re collecting. What sorts of things is Emerging Formats interested in?
We use “emerging formats” to refer to what we call complex born-digital publications. They’re publications created first and foremost to be published, distributed and read in a digital environment. But they are also structurally and technically more complex than digital publications that we currently collect at scale, such as PDFs, standard ebooks or e-journals. There are more challenges for us because of their complexity, but for the same reason, they’re also more fragile. They rely on the original software and hardware they were designed for, which increases the risk of disappearance if you don’t collect them in a timely manner.
