When trying to establish what is meant by digital preservation, the first question that must be addressed is: what are you actually trying to preserve? This is clear in the analog environment where the information content is inextricably fixed to the physical medium. In the digital environment, the medium is not part of the ____________. A bit stream looks the same to a computer regardless of the media it is read from. A physical carrier is necessary, but as long as the source media can be read, bit-perfect copies can be made cheaply and easily on other devices, making the preservation of the original carrier of diminishing importance. As the physical media that carry digital information are quite delicate relative to most analog media, it is expected that digital information will necessarily need to be migrated from one physical carrier to another as part of the ongoing preservation process. It is not the media itself but the information on the media that needs to be preserved.
* inextricably: 풀 수 없게