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IDC is taking history into the future IDC Publishers is a highly specialized publisher in the field of humanities and the focus [is] on primary sources & cultural heritage. IDC Publishers makes available to institutional customers, such as university libraries, museums and research institutes, unique materials in the form of thematic collections, to enable them to serve their end users with the availability of the very rich primary sources. Those collections are available in analog form (silver halide microform preservation quality) with digital access and/or in digital form. Due to the special character of the materials involved it often concerns unique or scarce materials. Therefore a lot of these information objects are difficult to find, approach and access and often restricted to only one or just a few locations in the world. In most cases the original materials are in a vulnerable state and are limited to physical approach by public. Migrating the content to another media format is a necessary step towards publishing. The institutional owner of the objects usually needs a copy for preservation use in order to spare the original. Creating a preservation copy needs to take place in accordance with international standards of stability, quality and integrity. The copy can be filmed on a high quality analog or digital format, often on location and under difficult conditions. IDC's process has evolved in the last decade towards platform independent publishing, which implies that any project can start analogue and ends digital or vice versa. The analogue technique as 'first generation storage' still offers by far the best and most reliable characteristics which are needed to ensure stability for over more than hundreds of years. Therefore, despite the usual expectations, the analogue format still forms a vital and valued technique, since we are aware of the risks of data loss and the pitfalls of periodically drastic changes in the digital world with precarious necessities of migration 'upgrades'. In order to make those information objects more widely available to the academic field IDC defines selected and coherent sets of information objects into a 'collection', usually in close cooperation with scholarly specialists in the specific field. The content brought into the form of a collection is nowadays 'enriched' with a variety of issues such as:
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