Proprietary Data
Adobe Flash Animations and Interactive Applets
Animations, games, and other interactive applets created with Macromedia Adobe Flash Player and Shockwave Flash, along with their accompanying websites. These are primarily .swf files, but they can also include networked collections of .swf files and external assets, as well as the web pages where they are displayed.
Born Digital Photographs and Video shared via Social Media or Uploaded to Cloud Services
Digital images or video with no analogue equivalent and where the only copy is online with a social media platform. This entry includes images or videos created and shared as part of personal digital archiving, but also for businesses and others publishing data only via these services. Users of these services will likely lose their data if social media companies fold or make extracting or downloading data difficult.
Data Posted to Defunct or Little-used Social Media Platforms
Older or less widely used social media platforms to which content has been uploaded but for which no guarantees have been made about the long term.
Digital Music and Ephemera Shared on Social Media
Digital materials created by musicians and fans as a by-product of performance or recording, shared on websites and other social media platforms.
Digital Recordings Published via Cloud-based Music Sharing Platforms
Music licensed and playable through corporate platforms protected by rights management and subscription revenues and presented as compressed single-track recordings.
Smart TV Apps
Apps created for smartphones. Many are deprecated quickly but others survive through multiple update cycles. It is hard to maintain version control and often dependent upon the company that publishes them. There is no clear agency or mandate to record or collect.
Smartphone Apps
Applications created for smartphones. Many are deprecated quickly but others survive through multiple update cycles. It is hard to maintain version control and is often dependent upon the company that publishes them. There is no clear agency or mandate to record or collect.
Web Domains with no Legal Deposit
This entry regards the preservation of websites and domains that fall outside a remit of legal deposit (or no legal deposit mandate exists). Web archiving is able to capture large quantities of materials with routine and standards-based tools, but there are significant issues arising with intellectual property rights associated with website capture and republication. In many jurisdictions, but by no means all, those obstacles are overcome by regulations that enable a national library or other ‘legal deposit’ agency to copy and preserve content. Where no such permission exists, there is a significant risk of loss.