The State of Digital Preservation. Introduction : The changing preservation Landscape

Bibliographic description :
MARCUM, Deanna. Introduction : The changing Preservation Landscape. Council on Library and information ressources (CLIR). Text accessible : http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub107/marcum.html

Dublin Core
Title : Introduction : The changing Preservation Landscape
Creator : MARCUM, Deanna
Subject : Digital preservation, digital information
Description : This text is about the exploration and preservation of digital information for a long time. It si an extract of a report about the state of preservation of digital information.
Publisher : Council on Library and information Resources (CLIR)
Contributor :
Date :
Type : Text
Format :HTML
Identifier :http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub107/marcum.html
Source :http://www.clir.org/index.html
Language : En
Relation :
Coverage:
Rights : © 2004-2007 Council on Library and Information Resources.

"The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and, later, the Digital Library Federation (DLF) have been exploring the topic of preserving digital information for a long time. Don Waters and John Garrett wrote their landmark report, The Preservation of Digital Information, in 1996. In describing the problem, they wrote

Rapid changes in the means of recording information, in the formats for storage, and in the technologies for use threaten to render the life of information in the digital age as, to borrow a phrase from Hobbes, "nasty, brutish, and short."

Today, information technologies that are increasingly powerful and easy to use, especially those that support the World Wide Web, have unleashed the production and distribution of digital information. . . . If we are effectively to preserve for future generations the portion of this rapidly expanding corpus of information in digital form that represents our cultural record, we need to understand the costs of doing so and we need to commit ourselves technically, legally, economically, and organizationally to the full dimensions of the task. Failure to look for trusted means and methods of digital preservation will certainly exact a stiff, long-term cultural penalty..." [extract]