Addressing one of the most urgent societal challenges of the Information Age – ensuring that valued digital information will be accessible not just today, but in the future – requires solutions that are at least as much economic and social as technical, according to a new report by a Blue Ribbon Task Force.
The Final Report from the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, called “Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-term Access to Digital Information”, is the result of a two-year effort focusing on the critical economic challenges of preserving an ever-increasing amount of information in a world gone digital.
Although not all of this data should be preserved, digital data within the public interest – digital official and historical documents, research data sets, YouTube videos of presidential addresses, etc. – must be retained to maintain an accurate and complete “digital record” of our society. Such digital information is now part of what is known as cyberinfrastructure, an organized aggregate of computers, networks, data, storage, software systems, and the experts who run them that is vital to our life and work in the Information Age.
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“Addressing the issues of value, incentives, and roles and responsibilities helps us understand who benefits from long-term access to digital materials, who should be responsible for preservation, and who should pay for it,” said Brian Lavoie, research scientist at OCLC and Task Force co-chair. “Neglecting to account for any of these conditions significantly reduces the prospects of achieving sustainable digital preservation activities over the long run.”
The [one-day] Symposium will focus on one of the most pressing issues in today's Information Age: identifying practical solutions to the economic challenges of preserving today's deluge of valuable digital information. The event will feature four “Conversations” with distinguished experts from the academic, private, and public sectors.
Source: Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access
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