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apologies for any cross-posting dear all there has been a second Guardian article on digital preservation following the DPC launch. Details below. A short piece also apppeared this weekend in the Sunday Times Doors section (article not available online) - this was more uneven - it picked up quite well on copyright being a major issue in digital preservation but we felt it missed or misunderstood most of the real issues on migration and Domesday in particular - it demonstrates quite well however how much still needs to be done to raise awareness of the issues and correct some of misconceptions of the ease of preservation and migration- plenty of work still to do. Neil http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4369014,00.html Electronic trail goes cold Information stored electronically can, and does, disappear, says Mark Tran Mark Tran GuardianThursday March 7, 2002 Paper may seem fragile and ephemeral as a means of preserving information, but its virtues are all too apparent when compared to data stored digitally. Vast amounts of information are created, stored and accessed electronically, bringing with it enormous advantages.If you want to find out about the Phillips curve, a quick trip to Ask Jeeves will provide more than a bluffer's guide on the tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. But digitally stored information brings its own headaches.Technological advancement means there is a real danger that digital material will become inaccessible because of software and hardware upgrades.The BBC recently encountered this problem when it found that its £2.5m multimedia Domesday disk could no longer be opened, just 16 years after its creation. Now just think of all the masses of information stored on floppy disks, CD-Roms and DVD drives. Digital photos are all the rage now, but for how long will they be accessible? If it was only happy memories that disappeared, the problem would not be too troublesome. But the fact that digitally stored information can disappear is a serious issue for business. Firms with electronic records run the risk of not being able to access records, leading to problems of liability. Content companies such as publishers exploit their data in secondary markets and thus need it to be on "future-proof" formats. The government's emphasis on broadband delivery of an increasing number of public services could come a cropper unless the data generated by such delivery is properly preserved and is accessible. This is not just a theoretical problem, as George MacKenzie, keeper of the records of Scotland, discovered. "We have lost potentially important records," he said. "We advised a public body who were decommissioning their mainframe. We found a number of data sets that could not be read, either because the coding systems were not clear and the staff involved had left, or because the documentation had disappeared. We found out the hard way how important it is to keep the explanatory data." In another case, a department kept important policy documents in its email system. The department offered MacKenzie the entire contents of its email to preserve, but he declined because it would have been impossible for users to sort through the trivial stuff to find the important material. There are 2.7m web domain names in the UK. Only a fraction is archive material. Even major sites such as the BBC have only recently started to archive content. The UK even lacks an equivalent of the legal deposit system for the printed word, although the government has accepted that digital archiving should be subject to similar kind of legislation. "The fragility of digital media, the need to develop new skills and expertise, and the technological obsolescence of digital storage techniques combine to create a formidable series of challenges," says the digital preservation coalition, a group of 17 organisations formed last year that includes the British Library, the Public Record Office and Consortium of University Research Libraries. "If the status quo is maintained, there is a real danger that much of the informational content now available online and in other digital forms will be inaccessible for future generations." The nature and scale of the problem are such that the government and private sector will have to get involved. Some parts of the private sector have made headway, notably pharmaceutical and oil companies. Drug giants have to preserve data for regulatory purposes and scientific research. The Food and Drug Administration requires all drug records relating to development and testing to be retained. Those records must be retained in the form they in which they are created.Oil companies generate huge amounts of data from seismic surveys. They collaborate on surveys and have for years agreed to share the costs of maintaining the warehouses full of magnetic tape that holds the raw data."Far better to keep the data," says Kevin Ashley, service manager of National Digital Archive of Datasets, "for that 30 years rather than pay to acquire it all over again, if it is indeed possible." ****************************************************************************** ******* Neil Beagrie JISC Digital Preservation Focus Assistant Director Secretary, Digital Preservation Coalition JISC London Office, Tel/Fax/Voicemail :+44 (0)709 2048179 King's College London email: [log in to unmask] Strand Bridge House url: www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/preservation/ 138 - 142, The Strand, email list: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/digital-preservation London WC2R 1HH ****************************************************************************** *******