A gambit of digital preservation problems
Digital government information, like its private sector counterpart comes in many formats. I recently came across an article: Smith, MacKenzie. Eternal bits: How can we preserve digital files and save our collective memory? IEEE Spectrum, July 2005. (9 pages) that provides a nice overview of the many kinds of digital materials that need preserving and the relative challenges of preserving such material:
Like most difficult challenges, data preservation is really a mix of the simple and the complex challenges. At one end of the preservation continuum is a simple item, like an ASCII text document. Preserve the data by keeping the file on current media and provide some way to view it and you're pretty much done. We'll call this the "save the bits" approach. At the other end lie the harder cases, like these: A compiled software program written in a custom-built programming language for which neither the language documentation nor the compiler has survived. Continue reading
MN Library stores electronic state documents
As the depository community mulls the possibility of accepting deposit of digital materials from the Government Printing Office, I thought it would be helpful to highlight several libraries which are ALREADY collecting, describing, storing, and providing access to electronic government documents. Although most of these examples concern state documents, their storage and service requirements are directly applicable to federal digital deposit. For clarity, I will highlight one library per post. Today’s library is the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library. They currently store 1,452 electronic state document items taking up 4GB of storage space, for an average document size of 0.35MB. Their documents server has a 115GB hard drive, so they potentially have room for another 37,000 documents of average size. The hardware for their system cost about $2000. Unlike the Alaska State Library, MN used an LSTA grant to develop a management system for their electronic documents. The grant provided $19,200 for software development. Now that the system has been built, the Legislative Reference Library says it is “our hope that this system could be emulated and adapted by other libraries considering similar archives of electronic files.†So other libraries adopting the MN system likely will not have to spend $19K reinventing the wheel. If I’m mistaken, I hope someone from MN will correct me. Continue reading
New Remix from the Washington Post
We've added this to the remixes page. Votes Database, Washington Post. This site lets you browse every vote in the U.S. Congress since 1991. The data comes from several sources: the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, Women in Congress site and the Women in the Senate page, THOMAS, and the Web sites of the Senate, the Clerk of the House of Representatives Continue reading
Scarcity or Abundance? : Preserving the Past in a Digital Age
While researching articles for a bibliography on digitial preservation, I ran across this article that seemed worth sharing: Rosenzweig, Roy. Scarcity or abundance? Preserving the past in a digital era. American Historical Review, v. 108, no. 3, p. 735, June 2003. (28 pages) This article provides a good overview of the stakes involved in digital preservation, why web docs disappear, explains why historians can't fully count on the Internet Archive, and worries about the problems historians might face if digital preservation efforts are successful. Article also insists that digital preservation is much too important to be left to the technologists and that archivists and librarians need to be involved. My thanks to the Center for History and New Media for making this article available online. Continue reading
Hurricanes Katrina & Rita web archive
Internet Archive in conjunction with individual contributions created a web archive for Katrina and Rita. The site contains 25 million documents which were crawled between the dates of September 4 - October 17th. The site is available for the public. Continue reading