Printed documents can be locked away in some closet for tens or even hundreds of years without their usefulness being in any way affected. Digital information is another matter altogether. Digital media (cd’s, dvd’s) have limited life spans, hardware and software become obsolescent in a matter of years, internet links disappear almost as quickly as they appear, and software such as Photoshop makes it increasingly difficult to determine what is authentic and what is not. Digital objects consist of machine?readable rows of ones and zeros, and even a slight change in this bitstream can seriously jeopardise the original purpose.
Digital information is fragile – and at the same time we have grown extremely dependent on it. Who can imagine daily life anymore without mobile phones and internet? In any case, short?term fragility seems to be the least of our problems. It is in the long term that the effects of rapid technological developments grow much more serious – on scientific data which are essential for longitudinal research, on public records which ensure the government’s accountability, on television programmes which become more interesting and precious over time.
A central aspect of the new strategy is to develop a nationwide infrastructure for digital resource management, an approach which will pool the resources of participating organizations while distributing the responsibility of preservation across the entire network of stakeholders. The group is taking a "dual-axis" approach to the issue, which pairs the collaborative spirit with the acknowledgement that different types of collections will have different requirements for long-term preservation and access, thus balancing the technical and organizational considerations that are involved in taking on the large-scale project.
In 2009, the NCDD conducted a national digital preservation survey of stakeholders in both the public and private sectors and published an interim report last fall.
The FreePint Family is a family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success.
'FreePint... provides most of my professional development because it won't come through work and [other resources] just don't cut it.'
FUMSI Forum: Do you have a research question? Post it to the FUMSI Forum, where professionals share Q&A and useful tips on how to Find, Use, Manage and Share Information. It's free.
FreePint Shop:
VIP LiveWire:
