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Environmental Scans
Peter Lyman, Archiving the World Wide Web
"In the past, important parts of our cultural heritage were lost because they were not archived, in part because past generations did not - or could not - recognize their historic value. This is a cultural problem. They did not address the technical problem of preserving storage media - nitrate film, videotape, vinyl - or the equipment to access new media. They did not solve the economic problem of finding a business model to support new media archives, for in times of innovation the focus is on building new markets and better technologies. And they did not solve the legal problem of creating laws and agreements that protected copyright material and at the same time allowed for its archival preservation. Each of these problems faces us again today in the case of the Web."
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Dale Flecker, Preserving Digital Periodicals
"Digital materials are surprisingly fragile. They depend for their continued viability upon technologies that undergo rapid and continual change. All digital materials require rendering software to be useful, and they are generally created in formats specific to a given rendering environment. In the world of paper, many valuable research resources have been saved passively; acquired by individuals or organizations, stored in little-visited recesses, and still viable decades later. That will not happen with the digital equivalents. There is not a digital equivalent to that decades-old pile of Life or National Geographic magazines in the basement or attic. Changes in computing technology will ensure that over relatively short periods of time, both the media and the technical format of old digital materials will become unusable. Keeping digital resources for use by future generations will require conscious effort and continual investment."
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Samuel Brylawski, Preservation of Digitally Recorded Sound
"All audio preservation is expensive; it is estimated that preservation engineers' studio time required for a recording averages three time the length of the source recording. Digital preservation holds great promise but it adds significant investment costs, such as the creation and maintenance of repositories, and the generation of controlling metadata. Whether for lack of foresight or funding, digital mass storage systems for audiovisual works, common in broadcasting archives, are not being created by libraries. We face an extraordinary dilemma: at a time when a greater range of audio is available to more people than every before, and the means are finally at hand to preserve those sounds for posterity, we stand the greatest risk of losing them."
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Frank Romano, E-books and the Challenge of Preservation
"E-books are not a historical artifact or anomaly, but a new form of content conveyance - important for certain constituencies and also important from the perspective of maintaining a record, especially since many works will be in e-book format only. Growth, while steady, may be slow because of competing technical standards, digital rights management, definitional issues, and restructuring within traditional publishing as creators, existing publishing houses, and software companies position and reposition themselves in a changing market. A critical and perhaps underestimated set of issues concerns user acceptance."
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Mary Ide, Dave MacCarn, Thom Shepard and Leah Weisse, Understanding the Preservation Challenge of Digital Television
"In many respects, the dilemma of archiving digital content is the same as it was for analog: how do we preserve the substance of media while its physical containers decay or grow obsolete? For analog products, standard practice recommends procuring appropriate shelf space within a controlled environment. Digital objects may be handled in similar fashion - that is, as shelved artifacts - but this approach avoids examining the qualities that make digital both attractive and perilous for productions. Alternative digital storage solutions are being marketed all the time. Each new option brings its own set of pitfalls as well as rewards. The bottom line: the storage industry has yet to solve the problem of technical obsolescence with the creation of an archive format."
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Howard D. Wactlar and Michael G. Christel, Digital Video Archives: Managing through Metadata
"We are faced with a great opportunity as analog video resources are digitized and new video is produced digitally from the outset. The video itself, once encoded as bits, can be copied without loss in quality and distributed cheaply and broadly over the ever-growing communication channels set up for facilitating transfer of computer data. The great opportunity is that these video bits can be described digitally as well, so that producers' identities and rights can be tracked and consumers' information needs can be efficiently, effectively addressed. The 'bits about bits' (Negroponte 1995), referred to as metadata throughout this paper, allow digital video assets to be simultaneously protected and accessed. Without metadata, a thousand-hour digital video archive is reduced to a terabyte or greater jumble of bits; with metadata, those thousand hours can become a valuable information resource."
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