digital archivist
an archivist who is responsible for digital archives and who manages them to ensure the original information is preserved and can reliably be shown to be the authentic record.
Your Scottish Archives Glossary
The Your Scottish Archives Glossary defines archaic words and phrases, mostly Scots law terminology, commonly found in documents and records in Scotland’s archives. If you think a word or phrase should be added to the glossary, or an existing entry could be defined better, please contact us at your@scottisharchives.org.uk.
You can also use the Dictionary of the Scots Language as a further resource at https://dsl.ac.uk/ for Scots words and phrases (including legal terminology).
To find a term within the glossary, click on the initial letter of the word you are looking for, then select the relevant syllable segment displayed below.
Example: to find the term “roup” select section “R” then sub-section “Ro”
digital preservation
the process of ensuring that digital information remains accessible and usable, while maintaining its authenticity, integrity and reliability.
digital record
records which require an electronic device in order to be viewed. This can include records which were created as digital (known as ‘born digital’) and records which are electronic versions of paper or other physical records.
digitisation; digitised
this is a process through which a digital copy is produced from analogue – hard copy – records. Methods for digitisation may include scanning or taking a digital photo of an analogue records, such as a letter.
The resulting copy is a digitised record; the original record remain the hard copy item, as this is the format of the material as it was first made. Archive services consider digitised records to be different from records which were first created using digital means, such as an email or digital photograph; these are sometimes referred to as born digital records