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Tag Archives: digital preservation
Keeping up with data rot
Here's an interesting segment from CBS Sunday Morning from March 1, 2009 in which NY Times Technology writer David Pogue talks about data preservation. There are some great pictures from the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley -- and don't miss Pogue's interview with the museum's curator Dag Spicer. One of the most memorable quotes is from Don Menerick (sp?), Archivist @ NY Public Library:
"...there's a consensus that as the ability to store more and more data, the data itself has become less and less reliable."
ChangeTracker
ProPublica.org has launched ChangeTracker, a new tool that watches pages on whitehouse.gov, recovery.gov and financialstability.gov, "so you don’t have to"!
When the White House adds or deletes anything— say a blog post, or executive order—ChangeTracker will let you know.The latest changes are listed on the ChangeTracker website, or you can sign up to get alerts via their RSS Feed, Twitter, or email. They also have a guide to show you how to make a tracker for your own website. Continue reading
Powerpoint to the people
Thanks to Carl Malamud for the heads-up about this new article by Fred Kaplan at Slate entitled "PowerPoint to the People: The urgent need to fix federal archiving policies." Basically, according to Kaplan, the National Archives (NARA) are a mess. "Electronic records ... are generally not disposed of in accordance with federal regulations," and NARA is "still unable to accept M$ Word docs and PowerPoint slides." This endemic problem has been known for a long time. Kaplan links to a 2003 NARA study titled "Records Maintenance and Disposition in Headquarters Air Force Offices," (report written in January 2005) that had been FOIA'd -- oddly all of the recommendations were blacked out?! This shows that government agencies are not following protocols for digital records management and the agencies charged with preservation are not doing enough to either build solid preservation systems or work with agencies to help them get into the 21st century. Is this really the "end of history?" ["retweeted" from Carl malamud!] Continue reading
Are Federal Record-keeping Laws Out of Step With Modern Communications?
All the President's IMs: Are Federal Record-keeping Laws Out of Step With Modern Communications?, by MICHAEL C. DORF, FindLaw, Jan. 12, 2009. Dorf argues that our federal record-keeping laws are out of step with the ways in which people now communicate. Continue reading
Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth
The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011, An IDC White Paper - sponsored by EMC, John F. Gantz, Project Director, March 2008. This report estimates the dimensions of the digital information explosion. With figures like 281 billion gigabytes (the size of the "digital universe" in 2007, which is a million times the amount of digital data hosted by the Library of Congress in 2008 -- see Berman, Francine. Got data?: a guide to data preservation in the information age. Commun. ACM 51, no. 12 (2008): 50-56) and estimates like "By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006" the report has sobering implications for digital preservation. In fact, it notes that:
As forecast, the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home.Continue reading
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