Today! Live Webcast of Blue Ribbon Task Force Event "A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information" & Related Materials
In February 2010, the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access (BRTF) released their final report that runs 116 pages.
Today, Thursday, April 1st, the Blue Ribbon Task Force is having a one day event in Washington, DC. If sustainable digital preservation is of interest, you might want to take a look at the live online webcast at:
Today's event is titled, "A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information," and it gets underway at 9 a.m. Eastern/6 a.m.
You'll find the agenda for the meeting here (PDF). It's an all-day event with Clifford Lynch closing the "national conversation" at 4:30 p.m. Eastern.
Some of the people scheduled to speak, participate/speak on a panel, or moderate include:
+ Hal Varian, Chief Economist, Google
+ Paul N. Courant* – University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, University of Michigan
+ Timo Hannay – Director of Web Publishing, Nature Publishing Group
+ Abby Smith Rumsey* – Historian and Consulting Analyst, Library of Congress
+ Brian E. C. Schottlaender – The Audrey Geisel University Librarian at the University of California, San Diego
+ Chris Rusbridge* – Director of the Digital Curation Centre, University of Edinburgh
+ Wayne Clough – Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution
+ Brian Lavoie, Research Scientist, OCLC [Task Force Co-Chair]
+ Thomas Kalil – Deputy Director for Policy in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President of the United States
While we don't have official word from the BRTF we wouldn't be surprised to see an archived version of the event made available.
Finally, the task force is mentioned several times in a Variety article about digital preservation published this morning.
Storage media, like hard disks, tapes and DVDs, don't have the long shelf-life of film. Hardware and operating systems for reading them go obsolete quickly. And worse, the data itself inevitably deteriorates, losing a few bits here, a few bits there, until the file is corrupt and unreadable. Also, many records are contained in e-mails and instant messages that are seldom preserved in any manner.
[Snip]
There'll be a lot of information about the 60s and 70s," he [technologist Ray Feeney} says, "and some day when this problem is solved, maybe 2035, there'll be a lot of information from then forward. But we're in a situation where a lot of what we're doing today is at best at risk, and in some cases it won't be cost effective to save anything other than the finished product."
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