An Openness Of Information Communications Systems

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Information communication systems contextually are similar to the informing science idea and they are conveyed by three main categories making them operational in a real life environment. These categories are about technology, content/information/ knowledge and user interface/ability to state information needs, to find information and to understand presented information and content. We all have information technology and digital content at our disposal yet, but what is about information, knowledge and overall heritage preservation for the future generations? Thus, we are confronting with the problems dealing with the preservation of information age heritage in the context of the continuous technology change as well as continuous digital content explosion. The idea of openness in the world of information technology is slowly accepting through the information technology community. The information and digital content delivery space also need stronger emphasis on openness in order to achieve better and wider possibilities to preserve information age heritage. This is urgent need because of a strong emphasis of cloud computing and networked media storages making the scene that in some way can produce mental atrophy, not only of individuals but also of entire society. Some crucial observations as well as scope of actions and typical assumptions on this matter are also presented.

Keywords: Open system, Information-Communications systems, Heritage, Preservation

Introduction

The electronic media technologies of the late 19th century abandoned old media formats in favor of an electrical signal. Simultaneously, these technologies also introduced a fundamentally new dimension of media - interface as the ways to represent and control the signal bearing data. It changes how media functions - its properties were no longer solely contained in the data but were now also depend on the interfaces provided by technology. The shift to digital data and media software a hundred years later extends this principle further. With all types of data now encoded in digital form, they can only be efficiently accessed by users via software applications. As a result, the properties of digital media are now defined by the particular software as opposed to solely being contained in the actual content.

Material published as part of this publication, either on-line or in print, is copyrighted by the Informing Science Institute. Permission to make digital or paper copy of part or all of these works for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage AND that copies 1) bear this notice in full and 2) give the full citation on the first page. It is permissible to abstract these works so long as credit is given. To copy in all other cases or to republish or to post on a server or to redistribute to lists requires specific permission and payment of a fee. Contact [email protected] to request redistribution permission. We can articulate the relations between earlier electro-magnetic recording and reproduction technologies, which were developed in the last decades of 19th century, and media software developed 100 years later. While previous reproduction technologies such as woodblock printing, moveable type printing, printmaking, lithography, and photography retained the original form of media, the media technologies of the late 19th century abandoned it in favor of an electrical signal. In other words, they introduced coding as a way to store and transmit media (Manovich, 2013). Further, the way we form memories in information age is under the interaction with external information repositories, making possibilities for entering new period of time when we will store fewer information inside our brains.

Information sources interlinked through the communications networks as well as overall human activities rely on communication that becomes the information age fundament. As Edwards (Edwards et al., 2012) pointed, we are currently in the communication age where all members of a society are connected through the Internet, not just to it. Internet with the whole set of new information technology has decreasing our brain power and the brain has a certain area to memorize stuff for a short time span. Individual memory shapes the personality and personal memory. The sum of individual memories shapes the collective memory. Hence, memory becomes an important part of culture (Carr, 2011).

In the years since its start in 1992, UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program has supported dozens of preservation projects to preserve original documents from the earliest history. The program maintains a register of significant collections from the earliest history to modern times, which urgently require preservation. Our cultural heritage needs to be preserved in a form that will allow future generations to experience it. And, unless there is intensive international effort of large proportion to digitize this material, the knowledge we have today, especially in the fields of social and cultural space, will fade away. Sooner or later, all old magnetic records will not be playable, as well as old replay machines are disappearing. So even if we have the best-preserved collections, we will not have the machinery to play them. On the contrary, we can found old paper more stable than the paper from the modern time that is losing its readability through the time. Solutions could be aimed toward digitization of the paper texts but not without their context.

These notions lead us to conclusion that preserving information heritage of information age society will require a new generation of digital curators, information professionals whose role is to manage a trusted body of information in digital form for current and future use. This new class of information expert will draw insight and knowledge from the fields of information sciences and information technology and will help bridge the gap that has existed between the two. In the same time, information technology has given us faster, cheaper computing, improved interfaces, and rapid prototyping approaches that have allowed the library sciences to develop effective systems in an efficient way. Information science has put collection-building at the center of things: evaluating content and ranking its relevance to user communities. Here we can find the process of adding metadata as the process of making the information about information. In this process, digital assets management tools support automating metadata capture, intelligent indexing and appropriate handling documents. As data capture has become easier, data preservation has become less reliable because of shorter media life. As media degrade and interface to digital asset become obsolete, information is lost. Thus, we need an information infrastructure that supports an efficient, cost-effective, and robust preservation process. Outsourcing of collective memory, through the cloud and virtual storage could lead us to collective mental atrophy. Such scenario leads us to more complex observation on our duties to preserve legacy and heritage of information age civilization.

Information age heritage

What marks the information age is the way that our knowledge has changed and grown - and continues to grow, with the application of new information technology. So, while we may damage the past by observing it, we are still learning more and more about it. It is close to the Stille's (Stille, 2002) observation that our electronic world of television and the Internet is destroying our experience from the past, and reducing our cognition to timeless present. Such observations redefine in some way the heritage in its form, appearance, and functioning.

Classical definition or interpretation of the heritage includes all data stored in public and private repositories as well as values and knowledge that a society experienced in the past in order to preserve and transmit it to future generations. Its aim is to constitute a common values and knowledge on which individuals would share common social values. It is indeed the part of social knowledge corps in every society. The answers on how and what of these assets would be selected depend on their lasting value and significance for entire society and its members. In the age of digital civilization, most of digital assets relate to the digital copies of pre-existing works. These digital copies are not identical copies of the source, but only a representation of it in digital form. The crucial part of digital heritage comes from assets that exist only in digital form, such as electronic publications, multimedia productions, cultural and scientific databases, and on-line repositories (including Web sites pages).

Further, defining heritage could be extended with standard definition approach by which heritage refers to values, goods and thoughts from the past, and it is represented also by cultural heritage, the legacy of tangible assets (artifacts) and intangible values of society, where such cultural heritage improves the collective memory (Craig et al., 2011).

There is also interesting assumption that "the dawning of the information age has created greater societal demands for information from information-gathering institutions. The information age has inundated society with vast quantities of information from innumerable sources, and technically very advanced in its transmission and storage." (McKellar, 1993: 349). Thus, society starts demanding more knowledge to function properly.

Information age legacy can be accessed and shared through digital objects where these new digital entities remove physical barriers to public access and enrich knowledge of the society. As the damage and deprivation of physical heritage stores in the past means lost forever to humanity, digital heritage has also such risk. Nevertheless, digital heritage can be stored in more places and in more forms, ensuring in some way its survival. This multiplicity of location and form could guarantee existence of digital heritage for future.

Existence of various digital media forms and types as well as distributed repositories and cloud data storages with networked information, asks for proper digital heritage conservation. Since it is not possible to save all of these digital objects existed in information age society, there is a strong emphasis on digital heritage conservation systems that are manageable by cultural heritage professionals and information technology specialists through the open systems conceptualization. It must ensure proper preservation regardless what technology is in use.

Most of these issues related to digital heritage preservation are in some way visible through the Memory of the World Program for preserving and providing access to documentary heritage held in libraries, archives and museums as the embodiment of the memory of humanity managed by the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). The core idea of the program is that the all documented heritage over the world belongs to all. Thus, the international task is to preserve this heritage and also to make it permanently accessible to all. The mission of the Program is to ensure preservation of the world’s documentary heritage and to assist universal access to documentary heritage by using information technology (UNESCO, 2012a). Memory of the World program also preserves information resources of our society and ensures resources for future generations by providing information age legacy that creates our collective memory.

The Program maintains a register of valuable collections throughout the world that urgently require preservation. It means that digital heritage needs to be preserved in a form that will allow future generations to experience it. And, unless there is intensive effort country by country to digitize this material, the knowledge we have today will vanish (Amelan, 2003).

Current issues in keeping our collective memory and digital information preservation were discussed at The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation international conference held in Vancouver (Canada) in September 2012. It was held also with the intention to mark the 20th anniversary of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program. At the Conference, Vancouver Declaration was adopted (UNESCO, 2012b). Declaration tells that digital technology offers unique means of knowledge creation and expression. Further, the economic value of the digital information can promote national and development, and supports Millennium goals. No matter what source of this information is, enabling the continuity of the heritage is the basis for good governance and effective national policies. This includes the recommendation to consider creating an emergency digitization program aiming at preservation of digital assets and documentary collections that could be destroyed by natural disasters or wars, as well as an emergency forensic program for digital heritage that has become inaccessible. Declaration also declare statements supplemental to principles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights providing statement that each individual should have right to information, and that national policies should promote the right to information, open government and open data. This notion denotes the open platform concepts so needed in the process of preserving heritage of information age civilization protecting us, in the same time, from the digital amnesia.

Rushkoff lays some of our possible attitudes on these issues. He states "In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It’s really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make." (Rushkoff, 2010: 1). These notions tell us that as more and more aspects of our daily lives involve interactions with and even dependence on digital technologies, we have to question, what is about collective knowledge and memory. Thus, Rushkoff (2010) call for options in which instead of learning about our technology, we are choosing an environment in which technology learns about us.

In this digital era, a crucial issue is preservation awareness that is more important than ever before (Cloonan, 2012). Preservation as a managed process applies to all heritages and , in the information age, where a huge amounts of digital assets are interconnected and stored in repositories, there is a need for deeply understand what to keep for future. These issues ask for more efforts in the field of contextuality and connectivity of information repositories making the heritage of our civilization.

Information technology as well as information services have changed the way we use information sources and our memory, and they are changing the way by which memory functions. There are assumptions that information technology including Internet environment as communication media has become part of a transactive memory by which we are capable to classify information (Sparrow, Liu and Wegner, 2011). Such transactive memory exists in many forms, and this whole network of memory where individual has not to remember everything in the world, becomes virtual extensions of human memory. Hence, information age creates the question on how much information we have to memorize when everything we need to discover or remind is in information appliances interconnected through networked information repositories. The process of relying on others to store digital information for us creates transactive collective memory that decreases individual's capability of memorizing and processing information. Further, networked information and digital objects with the cloud computing environment also opens up the room for collective transactive memory and the processes of human memory are adapting to this technology movement within information age society. Thus, the society becomes more symbiotic with digital objects and losing the capability for knowing and understanding information in favor of knowing where the information could be found.

Preserving digital assets

The information age society shows slow but steady progress on recognizing the importance of preserving our heritage and protects our information and knowledge repositories. However, with the rapid technology development, the human communities and the society in whole need to keep this heritage information society produced. Digital heritage is not just transformation of traditional heritage into digital form. It is apparently the digital media production of society consisting digital objects. Digital objects include all forms of digital communication and digitized information/content. Thus, there are new forms of civilization artifacts that carry other forms of visible and invisible culture, social knowledge, and common sense. Modern culture is represented by the use and cultural significance of digital information objects, rather than by the objects themselves. These new digital objects as information age artifacts are characterized as global and collaborative contextual artifacts. In the same time, digital objects of a specific type are embedded in a networked environment so they can not be separated from other object without appropriate digital context. However, it is on every nation or group to define what artifacts to be selected from global resources available to them.

A farther question contextually related to the new digital heritage is which digital materials should be kept for future generations. This question arise the need for finding a way how to accurately select and preserve them. It is strongly connected with the assumption that digital objects ask for new preservation methods and polices because traditional ones are no longer usable for preservation of digital objects. The preservation of digital objects that are stored in a huge number of repositories urgently needs some sort of unified specification for storing and manipulating digital objects. In this way we could find a widely presented and used solution through the Open Archival Information System. This framework supports and determines the archiving, preservation and management of digital objects, as well as access granted to users. It is based on digital technologies that evidently offer more advantages for preserving and recording the memory of information age society. Digitalization produces digital archives and repositories, and it also provides an access to preserved (digital) artifacts in their original formats.

Preserving process usually consist of standardized workflows transforming digital materials into storage systems for farther management and preservation. In this process fixity of digital objects is a method for digital preservation. Digital objects have special characteristics that after encoding additional actions are needed to check that an encoded object is actually the same as it has been before encoding process and during the preservation period. The existed methods related to compute checksums, or cryptographic hashes are useful to audit digital content in that way. To ensure the authenticity of digital copies an analog fixity check is used; a technique to check if the source content and the content of its copy are identical.

These techniques of checking the identity of source and encoded objects have effect in how Kirschenbaum (2002) defines statement that digital objects are the same. In his words there is a notion that one object has the same bits as another associated with the knowing how those bits are physically encoded and recorded on a digital media In this process all the bits are recorded on storage media and resulted in digital objects that could also be treated as analog objects. Hence, each bit of entire digital object could be investigated to find the accuracy of written content stored on the digital (encoding) medium.

While preservation of cultural values, thought, and artful expression are core values retained in information technology re-tooling (Drucker, 2005), the revolution in digital media is not irrelevant in shaping the new practice. Drucker also states "The tools of digital media are not in themselves the core, but rather what one learns from the engagement or more specifically the practice of these tools. Thus, a diverse and flexible set of skills across a range of informational, expressive, reflective and critical tasks." (Drucker, 2005: 246).

Digital objects are presented by their inner structure of encoded things, and they are also allographic in contrast to analog objects. It is due to the fact that the digital objects are much richer with the details without less interesting information that are extracted from the artifact itself. Here we can find the task to evaluate digital object by its long-term value in order to develop an infrastructure by which digital objects could be preserved for the long period of time. These issues are concerning Digital Assets Management.

Digital Asset Management as content-centric system is useful as a tool for complex digital content storing, access and reusing from various sources and technology platforms. Complex content management tools are deeply concentrated to integration of authoring tools for creating new digital objects with the content storage infrastructure for general and widespread use of digital assets. In the same time, there is a strong relevance on new multimedia complex content challenges Digital Asset Management systems. These issues are influenced by greater demand for solutions to address longer-term preservation. One key initiative in the Digital Asset Management systems deployment was the Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata, a valuable specification defining a set of XML metadata for distributing, collecting and publishing content through the various system platforms. It was initiated in 1999 as a set of computer language standards and recommended usages for cataloging digital information and content transmission. It also standardizes building-block Web page language and institutes a framework for preserving digital content and metadata.

Coping with the preservation process meaningfully, there are common preservation challenges dealing with the context of the digital assets that are the subject of the overall preservation system. Hence, contextualization of content in collections is presented from the past and current work of informing professionals. Besides informing science professionals there are many various groups and community of users that documented the history and its life experience including artifacts. Thus, preserving context is a great challenge to any preservation activities with digital assets. A key goal is to preserve the context in which events, works and relations were created. Preservation is about much more than storing documents, but it also about preserving the context of the documents that are preserving. Digitalized information age opens new ways in this process of contextualization. Further, the term contextualization in the digital heritage ecosystem could be connected with various meaning. In some extent, contextualization is a crucial mission task of any heritage institution. This notion could be found in the words of Sterling stating that such task is aimed to protect our legacy while ensuring its importance to the present and future (Sterling, 2009).

Cook (1993) has advocated the emergence of a new archival paradigm called the post-custodial age in which he proposes that informing professionals should move from a content-based history to a context-based future. Changing from passive custodians to active document lists, informing professionals have to evaluate digital objects in terms of context, function, interrelationships and creation. Cook's concept of a postcustodial age emphasizes the skills of the informing professionals and it is timely in its relevance to the new challenges of information age society. These professionals also have to emphasize their expertise in contextualizing digital assets available through the global interconnected information sources and repositories.

The new created digital memory of our civilization involves the development and proposal, through a digital reconstitution of physical channels and media, of a new social picture of the past in which previously unknown visions of contemporary culture are concentrated and expressed. A historic perspective is essential in this process making it original as it may be. Its foundations were laid with the rise of an archival vision of the world from which documentation, conservation and museology have emerged as fully fledged disciplines (Renaud, 2002).

Further, many problems dealing with the information technology use in information repositories currently exist. These problems are how to secure digital objects through the time remaining them accessible in its original form Information technology is constantly changed and developed creating in some way incompatibility with their predecessors. Such scenario creates the possibility of digital objects inaccessibility within just a near future There is also consideration on Internet as widespread publishing medium of the information society, and some argue that all Internet content should be saved since the Web pages, forums, blogs etc. present (in some way) the picture of the information age society and such content creates new form of human heritage.

When the individual and social knowledge are digitized into some interoperable defined structural forms there is possibility that portion of the overall heritage will be still unknown. Liu (2004) concludes that the core problem is the ethos of the unknown, the place of the unencoded, unstructured, and unmanaged. In our current age of knowledge work and total information, what experience of the structurally unknowable can still be conveyed in structured media of knowledge? For him it could be the arts. Hence, we find the interoperability as another key category in preserving processes. Interoperability is the property that allows for the unrestricted sharing of resources between different systems. This can refer to the ability to share data between different components or machines, both via software and hardware, or it can be defined as the exchange of information and resources between different computers through communication networks. It is the ability of interoperable systems to exchange digital objects and to use exchanged information.

In some extent, there are forms of emotional embodiment of technology in current human-computer interfaces (Hansen, 2004) conceptualized through open-ended recursivity of technology and human interaction (Hansen, 2006). Hansen (2006) also argues for coevolution of man and machine making electronic literature and digital art as new kinds of intermediations. These issues introduce new waves in making cultural heritage which is extremely dependent on technology that evolves very fast and it is beyond corresponding preservation needs.

The current communication tools offer the possibility to exploit the richness of our cultural diversity but the way we manage and disseminate digital information will make the difference. Abid & Radoykov (2002) made assumption that for cultural institutions traditionally assigned with the collection and preservation of cultural heritage, these new trends open to them new questions on what of digital artifacts should be kept for the future and how they should be preserved.

Hence, future generations of online digital collections should thus work with emerging groups of users in the development of concepts and content in order to be able to create intelligent user interfaces and to give meaningful information (Cameron, 2001).

Open digital platforms and ecosystems

Openness as a concept crucially influences preservation of information age heritage. It is related mostly to infrastructure, openness of information systems and knowledge. Thus, it provides informing professionals with a huge number of possibilities. In such a way, Interoperable Open Architecture was developed in order to accomplish performance, scalability and reliability synergy. It is based upon open standards that deliver interoperability among systems and applications built at different platforms. These open standards allow interoperability using common System Data Dictionary as a meta-data collection describing the semantic meaning of information within intersystem data exchange. This semantic content gives the context by which applications could access relevant data in information processing. Naturally, the context is needed to understand the content and to confirm a meaning of the accessed data. Thus, systems working upon common semantic models are in possibility to be fully interoperable.

Open access portfolio provides new opportunities and challenges in the field of digital assets preservation. Hence, public archives, museums and libraries as important keeper of cultural heritage should develop system for openly accessible digital content that will foster the exchange of ideas and knowledge of entire civilization memory.

The concept of openness is more emphasized in cloud computing environments where various technology and applications platforms are in use providing delegated information processing and information storage functions. Such scenarios create a need for trustworthy and secured information storage. It is resulted from delegation process in which the information creators give information away from their place for storing and accessing purposes. Information creators are very often more likely to entrust their information to cloud computing delegates. This issue shows that the information creators more prefer the availability of information delegated to the cloud system than its security. Such notions notify the risk of losing digital heritage sustainability over the time.

In the field of open systems conceptualization, deployment and development, two approaches and definitions of open systems coexist.

Computing-based open system - is a set of open programming code, interfaces, and standards allowing any user of one system to operate and communicate with any other system. It is known fact that in past the term open source was applied only to the source programming code. In recent times, it is often applied to other forms of deployment such as open system ecology, and open technology including open hardware, open software, open content and open access. Open-technology combines hardware, software and content in a way that brake barriers between technology and information produced and accessed by this same technology. This open system based culture facilitates multiple forms of different platforms, approaches and goals of system development and deployment.

System-based open system - is flexible system that can adapt and change by interacting with its external environment. It is in fact close to the thermodynamic system that exchanges its characteristics with the environment. Second law of thermodynamics tells that system has entropy. In process of open system development the task is to remove the entropy from the system. Hence, we find the roots of the theory of open systems. The open systems theory is crucial in understanding a living organism and systems, and it states that living systems are open systems due to their characteristics of interaction with the environments. The theory of open systems belongs to the upper level of the general system theory that describes the general principles of any system.

Besides these two core description of open system, there is an issue related to the interaction of a system and society in a form of an open system as a process in which man and technology exchange information with their environment. In the context of open systems, interesting view is setting up organization as a system per se with several perspectives. Thus, Scott (Scott, & Davis, 2007) stressed three perspectives on organizations: Organizations as Rational Systems, Organizations as Natural Systems, and Organizations as Open Systems. Open systems perspective is also crucial in transforming our view on digital heritage that would be preserved for a long time. Bertalanffy (1956) stated that open system theory was initially developed by defining the concept of a system in which existed structure provides interdependence of individual parts. Bertalanffy also argued that the open system is strongly connected with its environment. Thus, the changes in the environment could start a process of changing in the system. In the same time, a change in the system could produce the environment change. This notion of the open system has also influenced the study of living systems, including groups and large social systems.

Bertalanffy found that living (organic) systems are open systems since they exchange materials and other components with environment, with constantly changing states of their components (Bertalanffy, 1950). Hence, Bellinger also stated an organization as open system made by interrelationships among the parts of the system and parts from external environment (Bellinger, 2004). Hence, the system approach was applied to the study of organizations, with such assumptions that the environment surrounding organizations had important effects on the structure and behavior of the society. The complexities of organizational behavior are well noted in academic research. It does seem that unlike the closed systems organization, the open systems organization provides timely reaction to change, and to exploiting opportunity that other systems fail to achieve (Ahmad, Veerapandian, & Wee, 2011). This doesn’t mean that open systems are superior for all organizations, and in all social environments. There are other strengths in the social and geopolitical environment that may make one paradigm more effective than others.

Opening up Information-Communications Systems towards Preserving Digital Heritage

The new media is strongly emphasized on the Information-Communications systems deployment and almost always correlates to digital media. In fact, some theorist exactly defined it by computer and communications use. Thus, Manovich (2001) defined new media by modern media and computers convergence based on five principles: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and cultural transcodification. Manovich’s fifth principle describes also the social effects of computer where the software mediation creates new digital culture. These issues relate to the Information-Communications systems comprising new media elements and communications-computer convergence deployment.

Very similar to the concept of Information-Communications systems slightly developed from the beginning of the 1980s, informing systems comprise three vital constitutional components. Cohen (1999) stated that informing systems consist of three components:

Informing environment - the system components of the system on the informer's and sender's side.

Delivery system - the combination of technological and non-technological elements including the communications channel

Task completion system - the components of the system related to the user and receiver of the information.

Thus, Information-Communications systems also have three core categories: the content (digital objects), communications (channels and media), and interfaces (information appliances). Information-Communications systems make also interactive extended communication - a form of a discourse network. Liu (2004) describes a discourse network as the network of technologies and institutions providing the entire society selection, storing, and processing relevant data. In such way, the society creates new media based information age heritage.

From the viewpoint of information technology, the current information-communications systems converge with media - this convergence is about communications - services/interfaces - content triangle. Thus, we are confronted with new form of media mostly presented with the term of digital, reshaping not only media industry but also a cultural milieu of entire nation on regional and global basis. The new digital devices as smart devices, linked through communications systems, are creating new forms of information-communications systems. The new form of information appliances and ubiquitous information technology creates the basis for the concept of an information-processing utility. Based on interactive and ubiquitous carriers of information, the first generation of new information-communications systems evolved to provide easy communication over time and space barriers. These new information-communications systems are media. They are virtual communication spaces for groups and societies interested in the exchange of information and knowledge in a global environment. Further promising technologies are pervasive computing and augmented reality. The notion of pervasive computing is a convergence of the Internet and mobile technologies. The emergence of communications networks in which smart devices communicate with each other and with the rest of the system opens the new forms of information processing performed by smart devices. Hence, we are entering the era of new media that are in fact, tools that transform our perception of the world and in turn render it invisible or visible just as the culture.

Open network

The Web as a platform promotes the digital revolution and the democracy in some way. Like democracy itself, it steadily gives some kinds of protection. Thus, in the context of the overall open systems democracy, the Internet neutrality is one of the core issues, which needs to be preserved in order to allow the unrestricted development of the Web, based on its principles of universality and de-centralization (Berners-Lee, 2010). In this process, open standards are the key in promoting innovation and creativity of the Internet use and in creating the diverse assets of Web sites. The open principle within network ecosystem design thus includes the principle of universality: This principle provides the Web with openness of technology by which every part of the network, information sources and the content has universal identification and presentation: The information flow is not dependent on technology anymore as the result of open principle deployment.

The question arises toward information age formalization as Internet civilization. This notion opens up the insight into reaching eternity of information sources and their digital assets. However, there is no yet adequate storage method for digital assets that can keep recorded content for a long time. In the information age society digital assets are stored through interconnected information repositories, and with the vulnerability of information technology we may lose a huge set of information making our knowledge partial. In the near past, information professionals predicted the inter-connected information environment a long time before the Web use. These activities were done through mapping and indexing associations between ideas, facts, and documents very similar to the way in which information is indexed by the human brain. Putting them in the context of the Web environment we could find new solutions connected very often with the Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web includes a vision of a Web of Linked Data, enabling the automated or semi-automated querying, sharing, and interpretation of data from distributed sources in heterogeneous formats (Shadbolt, Hall, & Berners-Lee, 2006). The basic building blocks are the Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs), which denote pieces of information and context. In such way, available information can be placed in new contexts and reused in unanticipated ways so the Web becomes the ubiquitous hypermedia system.

Open interface/software and presentations

Just like open-source software initiative and concept that is widely used today, there is also open-source hardware concept - the design as well as the code that runs on the designed product is open allowing others to use source design. It strongly influences media devices and user interface ecosystem. The goal is to deploy complete and universal user platform based on openness of technology in order to provide user helpful tools for acquiring knowledge, media consumption and learning for the future.

Computers, the Internet and information appliances have changed the way we live. Nevertheless, most of the technology is constantly in change producing diverse platforms and solutions. It is hard to handle them properly and it asks for alternative methods of technology development. As a solution we could find open source concept, which is not a technology, but rather ecology defined through a collaboration that has evolved along with the Internet. The open source software as a system component is related to the source code openness including free modifications, development and additional design. The production of software by open source communities is a core of the same relationship between solutions and open source ecosystems, respectively. The open structure can be viewed as a platform for ecosystems, built around open standards, and transparency. Understanding the dynamics of an open source ecosystem is actually complex task but it is obviously that open-structure represents the matrix of an open source ecosystem's infrastructure. The crucial term here is transparency. Transparency is the core category of any successful open source project providing us visibility into the code and the open source community.

Open content and access

Open system concept includes also open access category. Open access category denotes the access to the information technology and to the digital content residing in networked information depositories. This digital content is in a form of any individual media or interconnected hypermedia where the interconnection is executed through a variety of technologies. Hence, the uniform communications system is prerequisite for fully operable open access scenario. It is in a recent time provided by the Internet that allows users to communicate and to gather information. Hence, Information-Communication systems provide a huge set of information that can be accessed as the information commons by anyone, anywhere, and any time. It is close to the univerzalization of access, which is needed to avoid multidimensional gap separating those who have and those who do not have universally accessible technology. Such role may take Telecentres as public access points making global knowledge distribution and the base for digital heritage preservation.

Open content just as open software creates new forms of creating and accessing information and knowledge. Information age society is dominantly based on international interactions. Hence, information and knowledge content openness empower internationalization of the content making it more accessible to more people around the world. With open content more people be able to access more information repositories improving collective knowledge and memory. Thus, the open content is simply connected with the new open ecosystems through the matrix of sharing as a means by which knowledge is acquired.

Open access model is in some way accepted in a publication process and is mainly oriented to the preservation of institutional digital materials. It also includes open informing activities dealing with the freedom to access, study, and understand information in order to develop knowledge. Such freedoms ask for more efforts in finding ways to foster open content publishing and protection of digital resources. The potential of the open access and its opportunities need new practices in information storing and distribution that are not restrictive in a quantity we met in an era of print media.

Information age society is able to record knowledge by digital technology, and with the open access concept the knowledge becomes open and free as knowledge itself. Information technology is also providing platform for open access and open content, both in the storing and distributing information. However, with the increasing digital content stored and available for sharing, the long-term preservation of the digital repositories must be assured in order to preserve our heritage for future generations.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing as an information technology based tool is under the way in the process of preserving digital heritage involving individuals in acquiring and preserving their digital assets. Although there are currently not many cases of applying crowdsourcing in heritage preservation activities, it is obvious that the real potential of crowdsourcing exists.

In open platform community crowdsourcing is not a new concept. However, it is still not a clear term and category related to the preservation of digital assets. Most crowdsourcing projects in heritage institutions have not involved large individuals. With the Internet and Web tools as a highly interactive and participatory platform there is a room for developing crowdsourcing initiatives. Heritage organizations have central role in connecting individual users to contribute to the preservation of their digital assets through open crowdsourcing initiatives. Cases in present crowdsourcing initiatives are dominantly aimed to the digitized information resources and real digital content is partly left aside.

From the perspective of functionality, there is a notion that crowdsourcing is mostly based on synergy, which combines effects of the individual parts or team members. Synergy in such way actually redirects intellectual power from objects to the relationships between team members, and to the effects produced by these relationships. Corning (1983) proposed that synergy influenced the evolution of cooperation and the evolution of complex systems. We can see these cooperative interactions everywhere around us, and a synergy combines functional effects of the parts interacted in an open system.

It is known fact that the Internet changes our living habits and that it gives us new kinds of creativity and problem-solving scenarios. Also, the interconnected individuals and groups create new participation forms and sharing based on facilities that information resources provide (Shirky, 2010). The Internet as a communication media makes these interactions available to everyone. Thus, when we are focusing on the Web use through the neutral communication media such as the Internet, the crucial role have the terms of openness and universality.

Coping with the terms of openness and universality in the domain of information age heritage preservation, there is steady understanding of the potential of crowdsourcing. The digitization of analogue heritage resources puts heritage organizations closer to the greater use of the Web as a platform for integration of heritage artifacts. Digitization also ensures long-term preservation of the information, especially those held on delicated media. It creates new ways of access heritage content. When information is in a digital form and part of an open network, there are many possibilities for cultural artifacts to be shared (Oomen & Aroyo, 2011).

Crowdsourcing on the synergy basis creates the base for open, interconnected heritage. Interesting findings are within Crowdsourcing Representation Information to Support Preservation (cRISP) program initiative as collaborative approach in using Web archives for collecting representation information to ensure long term access to digital content where representation information is essential for successful rendering of digital content in the future (Pennock, Jackson, & Wheatley, 2012). It is aimed toward integration of crowd knowledge by which online sources of Representation Information would be found, collected, and preserved.

Further, there are several notions on crowdsourcing implementation in cultural heritage projects each making project less or more successful. These notions are related to human possibilities to capture and present digital information, to models of collaboration that would be acceptable for crowdsourcing as well as to models by which crowdsource team members would share their knowledge made by digital assets they used.

Discussion

The value of the information entity in information age depends entirely on its future, and its social mobilization. It depends also on its circulation through communications networks and devices/interfaces that provide the delivery of information. Consequently, confronted on a long-term basis by continuously increasing our knowledge corps, dynamic thought will have to ask what form to give to such a world, and how to install within the information age culture the new informational state of affairs. That is the task that we must fulfill today for our knowledge and memory for everlasting time.

Media is shaped by two core categories - time (as short as possible) and space (as long as possible) making information society we knew until today. But the processing technology development is almost finished and the information society not long exists in previous way. It is about the communication as the vehicle for any information process thus making new form of communication society. Communication is with human from the early days of our civilization and it is the tool for all human evolution phases. Further, information assets and artifacts become more outdated with the new media making information process virtual activity with virtual artifacts that often disappears when entire information-communication activity is finished. What would the future civilizations find about our information society with digital information assets and in many cases virtual artifacts?

Hence, we need adequate techniques and tools preserving digital heritage of information and knowledge society. Traditional museum, libraries and similar institutions are not more suitable to cope with the digital heritage, and there is a need for digital repositories of whole social knowledge corps. These new knowledge/memory institutions for the digital society will preserve the digital matrix of information society alongside traditional archives, libraries and museums. Preserving the digital heritage is principally a joint public and private responsibility where specific and well-developed heritage institutions exist for specific types of culture, government and scientific information. These institutions are well included in digital preservation, but the digital is a characteristic of almost all forms of cultural expression, well beyond the boundaries of traditional forms of culture. To preserve this aspect of the modern world, we need a new type of heritage institution and actions for encouraging the establishment of digital heritage repositories. In some extent, this portion of heritage preservation activity could be denoting with the crowdsourcing efforts derived from the open platforms conceptualization and open source ecosystems.

Each society has its collective knowledge that is product of technology and culture. When information technology is acting as the bearer of social knowledge, information technology professionals have important role in the process of recognizing knowledge as asset that is the product of interconnected nodes of information, people, tools, and social norms and values. Thus, every society has to find its own culture portfolio residing in information technology use. Technology should be accepted in accordance with the entire cultural values and beliefs of society and its members. Every individual with his or her learning models and acquired knowledge brings his or her share to knowledge corps of whole society. All of these create new digital society heritage in which every digital connected individual involves. With the development of sciences, technology and economy of countries, and the advancement of people’s cultural level, many countries slowly but surely put more emphasis to the preservation of their cultural heritage. The whole society recognizes the dimension of preserving human’s heritage and maintaining our intellectual base. However, with the rapid technology development, we are in front of the new need to conserve our heritage within new information society. In the context of Internet and social networks, every piece of information base is incorporated into digital objects. Digital objects of a specific type are embedded in a networked environment and cannot be separated from other object types. The digital is a characteristic of almost all forms of cultural expression in information age, and digital objects become the atoms, the building blocks of information society. To preserve this aspect of the modern world, we need a new type of heritage institution and new forms of activities, tools, and techniques capable to solve this task successfully. The artifacts from past civilizations were analyzed by history, archeology, sociology and policy sciences making us more wisdom about past of our humankind. But, would this stream exist in future after our civilization dominant by information technology no more exists.

It is of crucial importance for any organization or society trying to keep entire knowledge corps in a way of continuity, to capture the critical knowledge of each individual and to ensure the transfer of that knowledge to successor generations. The key to knowledge continuity is preserving the relationship and building a network to enable communication. Hence, the importance of the Information-Communications systems arise to the extent where each society has to find the ways for open networks, open content and open interactions in order to make the base for everlasting preservation of the digital heritage that information age civilization will create. This heritage will remain for future civilizations, too.