The Center for Technology in Government has received an NDIIPP grant from the Library of Congress to create and distribute a toolkit to help states expand their capacity to preserve digital information. Here's the news item from the Federal Computer Week:

A New York-based technology research center has developed an approach and methodology designed to help state and territorial archivists and librarians preserve digital information. Through an $800,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the University at Albany’s Center for Technology in Government has developed a national capability assessment and planning model -- containing information about the governance structure, business model, architecture, and data standards -- to assist governments in identifying, capturing and archiving digital content critical to government operations. Continue reading →

Continue Reading →

In preparing my letter for National Library Legislative Day, I came across this factoid: At a $36 Million level of funding for the Federal Depository Library Program, the program would have a per capita cost of TWELVE CENTS for each of the United States' 296,034,744 inhabitants. According to such experts as former Congressional staffer Bernadine Abbott-Hoduski, $36 Million would allow GPO to continue the current level of tangible distribution while putting their National Collection and Future Digital System in place. Isn't that worth TWELVE CENTS per person? If you agree, take some time today to write your Congressional Delegation. Information and talking points are available at the link above. Continue reading →

Continue Reading →

Like the United States, Canada also has a federal depository system. We at the Alaska State Library are fortunate to be a selective Canadian documents depository. As such, we are on the Infodep (sort of a cross between FDLP-L and govdoc-l) mailing list that has a public, but dated archive. Two recent announcements from Canadian Depository Services Staff show that our Northern (or Eastern if you're in AK) neighbors do things better and worse than us. On the one hand, I think they have a better understanding of the challenges involved with preserving digital documents as shown by this quote by Gay Lepkey, Head of Documentation of Publishing and Depository Services in an April 12th posting (full e-mail available on request to dnlcornwall@alaska.net) to the public infodep list (emphasis mine):

"As for the stability of electronic publications housed on DSP servers, we can say that the DSP electronic collection has been very stable since its Continue reading →

Continue Reading →

Last month, there were stories in the press about a Canadian company, Remote Approach, that is developing tools to help "identify, manage and measure" the use of PDF documents "in real-time." Now Peter Suber writes about this and related technologies in the context of eprints of open access scholarly literature.

Trojan horse eprints, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #85, May 2, 2005.

Suber reports that "Remote Approach is working on executable scripts embedded in PDF files that will report back to their creators whenever the files are opened, even after they have been copied and redistributed." He notes that there is an obvious issue of reader privacy but there is also a deeper problem:

'The deeper problem is that once we allow scripts in text files for benign purposes, it will be very hard to block, let alone detect, scripts for malign purposes. Malign scripts could subvert fair-use rights and open access.'

He also notes press reports of "a feature that would let a company block a document from being read if there's no Internet connection." He sees dangers in such technolgies:

Continue Reading →