Openness Of Information Communications Systems

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

The Rescue Tool for Preserving Information Age Heritage

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. More is about yet done 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 information age heritage in the context of the continuous technology change as well as perpetual 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

1. Introduction

The electronic media technologies of the late 19th century abandoned these formats in favor of an electrical signal. Simultaneously, they 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 as sets of numbers, 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.

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).

The way we form memories in information age is deeply influenced by the mere existence of external information stores, making possibilities for entering an era in history in which we will store fewer and fewer memories inside our own 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 shortchanged our brain power and the brain has a certain area to memorize stuff for a short time span. Individual memory truly shapes the self and personal memory shapes and sustains the collective memory. Memory is thus 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 ancient history. The program maintains a register of significant collections, spanning ancient history to modern times that 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 concerted effort country by country on a grand scale to digitize this material, the knowledge we have today, especially in the fields of social and cultural anthropology, will fade away. Sooner or later, all magnetic tapes deteriorate to an extent that they are no longer playable. And 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 acidic wood pulp paper introduced in the mid-19th century that is the real problem for 19th and 20th century texts that are losing their readability. 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 sciences 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.

2. 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 harm 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 sense of the past, reducing everything to a flat, timeless present.

In its traditional sense, heritage can be defined as all data (monuments, cultural and natural sites museum collections, archives, manuscripts, etc.), or practices that a society inherits from its past intended to preserve and transmit to future generations. Its aim is to constitute a common foundation of values and references on which society members can develop a feeling of membership and sharing of common social values. It is indeed the part of social knowledge corps in every society. The principles by which these assets are selected, rest on the fundamental characteristic of lasting value and significance. In the age of digital civilization, a significant part of digital heritage consists of the product of the digital reproduction of pre-existing works, which may consist of texts, images, sounds, or which may be of an audiovisual, graphic, photographic or cinematographic nature. This digital double does not claim to be an identical copy of the initial work, but only a representation of it: it is a snapshot, a print, and a trace at a given moment in time. The second component of digital heritage comes from data that exist only in digital form, whether they are Internet sites, electronic publications, multimedia productions, or cultural or scientific databases containing and organizing textual or graphic documents, sounds, still images or audiovisual or multimedia productions.

Taking the standard definition approach, heritage refers to something inherited from the past, and it is representing by cultural heritage, the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society making man-made heritage - cultural heritage enriches the collective memory (Craig at al., 2011).

The dawning of the information age has created greater societal demands for information from information-gathering institutions. The information age has produced vast quantities of information from innumerable sources, and technically very advanced in its transmission and storage. Society has become more demanding of simple information as well as knowledge.

Information age legacy can be unlocked and shared between people through digital representations where new digital surrogates remove physical barriers to public access and foster widespread knowledge. As the loss of physical archives in the past means lost forever to humanity, digital heritage is also in front of such risk although it can be in more than one place at a time and in more than one form, potentially assuring its longevity despite the ephemeral nature of the media. This multiplicity of location and form is both the promise and the peril of digital heritage.

With increasingly diverse digital media forms and types, distributed repositories and cloud data storages, networked information and transitive metadata standards, adequate preservation of our most valued digital assets requires answers to key questions: Which data should we keep and how should we keep it? By digital heritage conservation, everything can not be saved and it is not sure that preserved digital assets will be readable and accessible in five years, 100 years and what to say in 1,000 years. In the next 100 years, we will go through dozens of generations of computers and storage media, and our digital data will need to be transferred from one generation to the next. It asks for digital heritage conservation systems that are manageable by cultural heritage professionals and information technology specialists through the open systems conceptualization.

Such scenario is 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 prepared by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The vision of the program is that the world’s documentary heritage belongs to all, and it should be fully preserved and protected for all and, with due recognition of cultural mores and practicalities, should be permanently accessible to all without hindrance. Its mission is to facilitate preservation, by the most appropriate techniques, of the world’s documentary heritage, to assist universal access to documentary heritage (UNESCO, 2012). Memory of the World program preserves treasures of humanity and mobilizes resources so that future generations can enjoy this legacy that is preserved in the major libraries, archives and museums across the globe as the way to protect us of loosing our collective memory.

The program maintains a register of significant collections, spanning ancient history to modern times that 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 concerted effort country by country on a grand scale to digitize this material, the knowledge we have today, especially in the fields of social and cultural anthropology, will fade away (Amelan, 2003).

In order to preserve our collective memory issues concerning the management and preservation of digital information were examined at the international conference The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation held in Vancouver (Canada) in September 2012 to mark the 20th anniversary of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program. At the Conference, Vancuver Declaration was adopted (UNESCO, 2012a). Declaration tells that Digital technology offers unprecedented means of knowledge creation and expression. The economic value of the resulting information can promote national and sustainable development, and support millennium goals. Whether the origins of this information derive from digitally created documents or from digital surrogates of analogue documents, enabling its continuity is the groundwork of good governance and effective policies, but these can only be assured if the major challenges are addressed. This includes the recommendation to consider creating an emergency digitization program aiming at preservation of digital assets and documentary collections endangered by natural disasters or armed conflicts, as well as an emergency forensic program for digital heritage that has become inaccessible.

Declaration also includes an extension of a principle in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights providing statement that each individual should be guaranteed access to information, including in digital format, and that national policies should be established to 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 it on the line on page one three sentences that described our possible mainstreams with these issues. 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: p.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 opt for a world in which our technology learns about us.

.

In this digital era, Preservation awareness is more important than ever before (Cloonan, 2012). Conservation, Preservation, and restoration are terms that apply to all heritages, natural, man-made and socially constructed. In the information age where a huge amounts of digital assets are interconnected and stored in repositories, there is a need for constant analysis of what to keep and what to let go. 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 our memories function. There are assumptions that information technology including Internet environment as communications media has become part of a transactive memory source, a method by which our brains compartmentalize 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.

3. Preserving digital assets

The whole society recognizes the importance to preserve human’s heritage and safeguard our spiritual homeland. However, with the rapid technology development, we are in front of the new need to conserve our heritage from current information society. Digital heritage is not just traditional heritage in digital form. It is something like the digital fabric 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 cultural objects as information age artifacts are characterized as global, heterogeneous, fluid and dynamic, interactive and collaborative, interrelated, fragmented, multimodal, embedded and contextually exposed. Digital objects of a specific type are embedded in a networked environment and cannot be separated from other object types. In the same time, the digital context is not defined by national production. However, it is defined by what a nation selects from global resources.

Preserved digital objects are stored in repositories, the specifications of which are largely held to strict standards such as the Open Archival Information System. This framework supports the archiving of digital objects. It determines their management and the preservation activities to which they are subject, as well as access granted to users. Digital technologies offer clear advantages for preserving and recording our historical and cultural memory. With notionally unlimited storage capacity, digital archives make an ideal repository. Digitization solves the traditional problem of accessing preserved artifacts in their original formats, particularly very old or rare documents.

A question that has become extremely pressing is which of the enormous number of digital materials should be kept for future generations, and how to go about selecting and preserving them. It is strongly connected with the assumption that digital objects demand new preservation polices and agreements since traditional preservation policies as we know them in the analogue domain are no longer relevant or they are no longer sufficient to guarantee the preservation of digital objects.

Preserving process very often consist of generic workflows to get digital collections into storage systems for management and preservation. Fixity is often a key concept for digital preservation. Digital objects have a curious nature when they are encoded so additional techniques are needed to check that a given digital object is actually the same thing 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 copies of texts scribes would count their way to check and make sure that new copies had the same middle paragraph, the same middle word and the same middle letter. It’s an analog fixity check; a technique to check if the encoded content of the text is identical to the encoded content of the copy.

These conceptions, of something being the same as something else have corollaries in how Kirschenbaum (2002) defines assertions that digital things are the same. In his vocabulary there is a formal sense, in which one object has the same bits as another (the same one’s and zeros) and the forensic sense, in which we think about how those bits are physically encoded and inscribed on an individual artifact. All the bits we care about are inscribed on storage media. Interestingly, in the forensic sense, all digital objects are also analog objects. While we read bits off disks each of those individual bits is on some level its own little unique snowflake. Each bit could conceptually be analyzed at the electron microscope level as having a signature, as having a length and a width on the medium on which it is encoded.

While cultural preservation, critical thought, and artful expression are core values retained in educational re-tooling (Drucker, 2005), the revolution in digital media is not insignificant in shaping the new practice. 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: pp. 246).

Digital objects are always encoded things, in this sense they are allographic and their essence is more allographic than those analog corollaries, as the encoding is much richer and leaves much less interesting information residing in the artifact itself. The goal is to evaluate the long-term value of any particular digital object and work to develop a technical and social infrastructure that will enable us to successfully preserve the objects over time. These issues are concerning Digital Assets Management.

Digital Asset Management focuses to a greater degree on complex content and on maximizing the ability to access and reuse it. Complex content generally means multimedia including images, video, audio and materials with a dynamic complexity. The tools are concentrated to a greater degree on integration with creative authoring tools to allow asset managers ready access to their content storage infrastructure for re-use purposes. Multimedia complexity challenges Digital Asset Management systems and it is even more challenging as they start to address longer-term preservation and stewardship issues.

One key initiative in the digital Asset Management systems deployment was the Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata, a specification that defines a set of XML metadata vocabularies for syndicating, aggregating and multi-purposing publishing content. 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. There is a long tradition of contextualization of content in collections by a wide range of users, including scholars, amateur historians and other enthusiasts. They have done so by writing scientific publications, compiling magazines that document the history of the city they live in, studying their family histories, using archival footage as illustrations for monographs and so on. Thus, preserving context is a great challenge to any preservation activities with digital assets. There is a long tradition of contextualization of content in collections by a wide range of users, including scholars, amateur historians and other enthusiasts. They have done so by writing scientific publications, compiling magazines that document the history of the city they live in, studying their family histories, using archival footage as illustrations for monographs and so on. A key goal is to preserve the context in which important events or discoveries occurred or works of art were created. Thus, preservation is about much more than archiving documents. It is also about preserving the context in which important events, discoveries, and works of creation took place. The term contextualization has many connotations in the heritage domain. In some extent, contextualization has always been part of the mission statement of heritage organizations. This notion could be found in the words of Bruce Sterling "The grand plan here is to protect the legacy of the past while also ensuring one’s relevance 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 archivists should move from a content-based past to a context-based future. Changing from passive custodians to active document lists, informing professionals are to appraise records in terms of context, function, interrelationships and creation. Cook's concept of a postcustodial age emphasizes the skills of the informing professionals and is timely in its relevance to the challenges of information abundance. These professionals are to assert their expertise in contextualizing digital assets within repositories of information 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 ‘praxis’ of the past in which previously unknown visions of contemporary culture are concentrated and expressed. Once again a historic perspective is essential: original as it may be, informational memory did not appear out of nowhere. 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, currently there are technical problems in ensuring that the digital material saved in information repositories and archives remains accessible in its original form. Software and hardware are constantly changed and developed which ultimately become incompatible with their predecessors. This means that within just a few years, material which often includes sound, video, pictures, as well as links to Internet Web pages and cloud-based databases becomes inaccessible.

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 two or more components or systems to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged.

In some extent, there is affective embodiment of technology in human interfaces (Hansen, 2004) where subjectivity and technology, body and machine are conceived in terms of an open-ended recursivity with one another (Hansen, 2006). Hansen (2008) also argues for their coevolution 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 beyond corresponding preservation needs.

The current communication tools offer the possibility to celebrate and cherish the richness of our cultural diversity but the way we manage and disseminate digital information will make the difference. For cultural institutions traditionally assigned with the collection and preservation of cultural heritage, these new trends challenges them in questioning which aspects of their materials should be kept for future generations 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, 2002).

4. Open digital platforms and ecosystems

Open infrastructures and openness in general, can lower costs and expand possibilities. In such a way, Interoperable Open Architecture provides the combined attributes of performance, scalability and reliability. It is based upon open standards that deliver interoperability among sub-systems and applications built at different times and places. Open Standards allow interoperability that is based on defining a System Data Dictionary as a set of meta-data that defines the semantic information associated with every piece of data. This semantic data contextualizes it or allows it to be re-contextualized to the application using it. Naturally, the context contributes to the semantic understanding of the data and provides a means to evaluate the veracity and utility of the data. When systems work upon a common semantic data model and not a bunch of syntactic messages they can start to become truly interoperable.

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

Individuals as well as organizations are more likely to entrust sensitive data to cloud providers than they are to business partners or outsourced data centre hosting companies. They are also more likely to entrust sensitive data defined as data concerned with confidentiality and secrecy with cloud providers than mission-critical data, data that is associated with availability, continuity and data recovery practices. This suggests that they are more concerned about the availability of data hosted in the cloud than its security. Such notions warn of risk of losing digital heritage sustainability over the time.

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

Computing-based open system as non-proprietary system based on publicly known standard set of interfaces that allow anyone to use and communicate with any system that adheres to the same (open) standards. While the term open source applied originally only to the source code of software, it is now being applied to many other areas such as Open source ecology, a movement to decentralize technologies so that any human can use them. The principles of open source have been adapted for many forms of user generated content and technology, including open source hardware, open content and open access. Open-source hardware consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered in the same manner as free and open-source software and the hardware design in addition to the software that drives the hardware are all released with the open system approach. This open system-based culture or ideology takes the view that the principles apply more generally to facilitate concurrent input of different agendas, approaches and priorities, in contrast with more centralized models of development and deployment.

System-based open systems as flexible systems that can adapt and change by interacting with its external environment are in their roots thermodynamic systems that exchange mass, as well as energy and momentum, with the environment. The properties of open systems are simplest near the state of thermodynamic equilibrium. If the deviation of an open system from thermodynamic equilibrium is small and the system’s state changes slowly, then the nonequilibrium state may be characterized by the same parameters as the equilibrium state. The degree of disorder of such open systems, like the degree of disorder of systems in the equilibrium state, is characterized by the entropy. According to the second law of thermodynamics, in a closed isolated system the entropy increases, tending toward its maximum equilibrium value, whereas the entropy production tends toward zero. In contrast to a closed system, steady states with constant entropy production are possible in open systems; in this case the entropy must be removed from the system. The theory of open systems is important for understanding the physicochemical processes underlying life, since a living organism is a stable self-regulating open system that has a high level of organization on both the molecular and macroscopic levels. The treatment of living systems as open systems in which nonlinear chemical reactions take place opens up new possibilities for study of the processes of molecular self-organization at the early stages of the evolution of life. The theory of open systems is a particular case of the general theory of systems, which include data-processing systems, transportation junctions, power-supply systems, and others that are treated in cybernetics. Such systems, although not thermodynamic, can be described by a system of balance equations that in the general case are nonlinear and analogous to those considered for physicochemical and biological open systems.

Besides these two core description of open system, there is also interaction of a system and society in a form of an open system as a process that exchanges material, energy, people, capital and information with its environment. In the context of open systems, interesting view is setting up organization as a system per se with several perspectives. Scott (Scott and Davis, 2007) stressed three perspectives on organizations: Organizations as Rational Systems, Organizations as Natural Systems and Organizations as Open Systems. Open systems perspective is 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 characterized by an assemblage or combination of parts whose relations make them interdependent. Bertalanffy also emphasized that the open system interacts with its surrounding environment, and that a change in the environment would in effect initiate a change in the system. Additionally, a change in the system would initiate a change in the environment. This notion of the open system has greatly influenced the study of all living systems, including large social systems.

As one moves from mechanical to organic and social systems, the interactions between parts in the system become more complex and variable. The systems approach was quickly applied to the study of organizations, and with it an acknowledgment that the environment surrounding and permeating organizations had important effects on society behavior and structure. The complexities of organizational behavior are well noted in academic research. It does seem that unlike the closed systems organization, the open systems organization enjoys benefits such as speed of reacting to change, and to exploiting opportunity that other systems fail to achieve (Ahmad, Veerapandian, & Wee Yu Ghee, 2011). This doesn’t mean that open systems are superior for all organizations, in all social environments. There are other forces in the social and geopolitical environment that may make one paradigm more effective than others.

5. 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 as the result of the combination of modern media and computers through five principles: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and cultural transcodification. Manovich’s fifth principle describes also the social effects of the intertwining of computer and cultural layers giving software mediation as the main cultural aspect of digital culture. These issues relate to the term of information-communications systems consisting communications, interface and content in a general term.

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: an informing environment, a delivery system and a task completion system. The delivery system represented the combination of technological and non-technological elements that comprised the communications channel. The informing environment represented the system components of the system on the informer's (sender's) side. The task completion system involved the components of the system related to the client (user, receiver) of the information.

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 that allow a given culture to select, store, and process 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. Thus, 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 systems evolved to provide easy communication over time and space barriers. Thus, the new information systems are media. They are virtual communication spaces for communities of agents interested in the exchange of goods and knowledge in a global environment. Further promising technologies are pervasive computing and augmented reality. The vision of pervasive computing is to some extent a projection of the future fusion of two phenomena of today: the Internet and mobile telephony. The emergence of large networks of communicating smart devices means that computing will no longer be performed by just traditional computers but rather by all manners of smart devices. Hence, we are entering the era of new media. New media are tools that transform our perception of the world and in turn render it invisible or visible just as the culture.

Open network

The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity-and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending. Thus, Internet neutrality is one of the core issues that needs to be preserved in order to allow the unhindered development of the Web, based on its principles of universality and de-centralization (Berners-Lee, 2010). In this process, open standards are the key to keep innovation at maximum in the Internet: creating the diverse richness of Web sites. The open principle within network ecosystem design includes thus the principle of universality that allows the Web to work no matter what hardware, software, network connection or language is used.

The question arises toward information age formalization as internet civilization. This notion opens up the eternity of information sources and their digital assets. Although has real high tech aspects, there is no storage method for digital assets that can predictably last for fifty years. In the information age we may lose a huge set of information making our knowledge partial. In other words, digital assets stored through interconnected information repositories and we have to know that information technology is vulnerable to all kinds of passing upsets. In the near past, scholars and researchers envisioned worlds of inter-connected information centuries before the Web existed. The ideas of mapping and indexing associations between ideas, facts, and documents long pre-date the existence of computers, and in many ways, they reflect the sophisticated way in which information is indexed by the human brain. The solutions were connected very often with the Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web encapsulates 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 data, be they text, documents, media, or concepts. Abundantly 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 work, study, and communicate. Many computer systems are not equipped to handle the upcoming turn of the century, and an alternative method of software development exists: It is open source concept, which is not a technology, but rather ecology defined through a collaborative process that has evolved along with the Internet. The most basic definition of open source software is software for which the source code is distributed along with the executable program, with the freedom to modify and redistribute the software. The production of software by open source communities is a microcosm 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 an admittedly complex but it is obviously that open-structure represents coagulation of an open source ecosystem's infrastructure. The crucial term here is transparency. Transparency is the hallmark of a successful open source project providing us visibility into the code, into the open source community and all the artifacts of its development, distribution and deployment.

Open content and access

Public access includes access to the technology and access to all the content stored in the world's networked information depositories. The content could be textual, audio, video or multimedia. The connectivity can be through a variety of technologies. Hence, the public use Internet access to communicate and for searching/gathering information. Information-Communication systems provide the vast quantities of information that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, any time as the information commons. 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.

In spite of several legislation efforts toward openness of the knowledge published in journals such proposals have not been universally welcomed. Individuals and organizations that are against open access and open content platforms cope with the fact that publishing certainly is expensive and it is not always possible to rely on donations or the taxpayer to pay the information. The fear of publishers and societies is that if they give away their journals for free then no one will pay to be a member or subscriber. The fear lays in the attitude of those who are actually knowledge cartels controlling the supply of information in their field and profiting from restricting access. Open access is a direct attack on the business models of these societies. While mandated open access may not directly hurt societies, by forcing them to make some of their articles freely available it will become a competitor and one that they will be hard pressed to beat. It will have all the benefits of their own publications, peer review, volunteer work, but people will be able to access it for free.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing has been increasingly used by cultural heritage institutions to involve users in the development and curation of their collections. Although there are currently not many cases of applying crowdsourcing in Web Archiving it is obvious that the potential and relevance of crowdsourcing exist.

In open platform community, crowdsourcing is not a new concept. However it is a vague term which can be easily interpreted as exploitative relating to free labor. Most crowdsourcing projects in heritage institutions have not involved large crowds and have had very little to do with outsourcing labor. With the Internet and Web tools as a highly interactive and participatory platform there is a room for developing crowdsourcing initiatives. Heritage organizations are increasingly inviting users to contribute to the growth and curation of their collections through crowdsourcing initiatives. Most of this work has focused on digitized resources and rare are contributed to born digital content.

From the perspective of functionality, there is a notion that crowdsourcing is mostly based on synergy where synergy refers to combined or cooperative effects, the effects produced by things that operate together. Synergy shifts our theoretical focus from mechanisms, objects or discrete bounded entities to the relationships among individuals, and to the functional effects that these relationships produce. Corning (1983) proposed that synergistic phenomena of various kinds have played a key causal role in the evolution of cooperation generally and the evolution of complex systems in particular; it was argued that a common functional principle has been associated with the various steps in this important directional trend. Cooperative interactions are everywhere in nature, to be sure, but the particular focus of a synergy orientation is the subset of all imaginable interactions that have combined functional effects (positive or negative) for those aspects of the material world that we wish to understand more fully. Synergistic causation is configurational; synergistic effects are always co-determined.

It is notably that the Internet changes the way we spend our spare time and cognitive surplus that used to be spent on passive activities can now be used in a profoundly different way, for new kinds of creativity and problem-solving. Also, the wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource, and lets us design new kinds of participation and sharing that can take advantage of that resource (Shirky, 2010). The very design of the Internet makes these interactions possible. The core design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth is openness and universality.

In the heritage domain, Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums around the globe are beginning to explore the potential of crowdsourcing. The mass digitization of analogue holdings is the key to heritage organizations becoming an integral part of the Web. In the case of fragile carriers digitization is a means to ensure long-term preservation of the information. Digitization is also a precondition for creating new access routes to collections. Once digital and once part of an open network, cultural artifacts can be shared, recommended, remixed, mashed, embedded and cited (Oomen & Aroyo, 2011).

Crowdsourcing on the synergy basis has the potential to help build a more open, connected, and smart heritage with involved stakeholders. 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 (Wheatley, Pennock, and Jackson, 2012). Its aim is to integrate the wisdom and knowledge of the crowd to identify online sources of Representation Information, and then collect, classify, and preserve them.

There are serious considerations for crowdsourcing in cultural heritage projects each making project less or more successful. These considerations are about human possibilities to compute and present digital information, what models of collaboration are acceptable for crowdsourcing as ell as to find models by which participants would share their knowledge, idea and assumptions made by digital assets.

6. Discussion

The value of the information entity in information age depends entirely on its future, its social mobilization. It depends simultaneously on its circulation through communications networks and devices/interfaces that provide the delivery of information. Consequently, confronted on a long-term basis by the exponential increase in capacities and achievements of every sort, 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 (short as possible) and space (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 (access, retrieve etc.) 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 streams from the caveman to the spaceman. Further, information assets and artifacts become more obsolete with the new media making information process virtual activity with virtual artifacts that disappears (often) when entire information-communication activity is finished. What would the future civilizations find about our so called 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 fabric 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: museums, archives and libraries. These institutions are well on their way towards 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 an organization's members. Every individual with his or her learning models and acquired knowledge brings his or her share to organization's knowledge corps. 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 gradually put more emphasis to the preservation of their cultural heritage. The whole society recognizes the importance to preserve human’s heritage and safeguard our spiritual homeland. 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 society, and digital objects become the fabric of 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 remain.