I worked at the Library of Congress on their Digital Preservation Project digitizing and archiving their collections. When an archivist analyzes a piece of med

I worked at the Library of Congress on their Digital Preservation Project digitizing and archiving their collections. When an archivist analyzes a piece of media, everything ends up being important. For something like an album, you don't just have the audio but the physical media itself, the sleeve, the notes, and the settings of every piece of equipment used in capturing each of those things. Imagine for example, you realize the Photoshop filters were off/wrong in some way? When you modify the media and treat it as definitive in some way, you're introducing your own analysis (good or bad), just like a Photoshop filter. Even if you're 100% "correct" in the result, it's no longer the same and the next person is applying their analysis on top of yours. It's effectively a game of telephone. It's not a matter of "most accurate" representation of a moment in time but an "unmodified" representation of a moment in time. The difference between that and editing books, movies, music, etc applying current norms and expectations becomes semantic.