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Abstract The tools and standards of best practice adopted by cultural heritage (CH) professionals will determine the sustainability of digital heritage, or lack of it. The paper explores a digital future for cultural heritage through key principles: adoption of digital surrogates, empirical provenance, perpetual digital conservation, and the democratization of technology. This paper focuses on the barriers influencing widespread adoption of digital techniques in science and scholarship, and how these issues are mitigated through the practice of archival tolerance and self-documenting work practices. We draw on several successful examples from current projects, including collaborations with the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Southern California and Cultural Heritage Imaging. From field capture to archive to public sharing, we will demonstrate the impact of unifying core heritage documentation values and practices with the enormous power of the digital age through breakthrough techniques for digitally acquiring empirical information about our world, especially for cultural heritage. We develop the key concept of ‘born-smart, born-archival’ digital representations and the roles the information acquisition process, empirical provenance records, and semantically-based knowledge management strategies play in generating ‘born-archival’ digital information. The paper also explores how empirical provenance can contribute to the authenticity and reliability of digital surrogates and, in combination with principals of perpetual digital conservation, can ensure that digital surrogates will be archived and available for future generations.
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