National Science Foundation
"Workshop on Research Challenges in Digital Archiving: Toward a National Infrastructure for Long-Term Preservation of Digital Information"
Following is a brief overview of this workshop, written by Margaret Hedstrom, associate professor at the School of Information at the University of Michigan and a member of the National Digital Strategy Advisory Board.
The ability to provide long-term access to digital information is a significant challenge for government agencies, scientific data repositories, libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage organizations. Repositories of digital information are surpassing physical archives in both scale and significance, but methods for ensuring their longevity remain experimental and present important topics for research. Because the digital archiving challenge is complex, progress in this area depends on segmenting the broad problem of long-term preservation into reasonable research objectives, setting priorities, mobilizing resources and encouraging more research to address this problem.
In April 2002, 50 experts from government, industry and academia participated in a workshop to identify research challenges and develop an agenda for research for digital archiving. The workshop, held at the Airlie Center in Warrenton, Va., was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Digital Government Program, the NSF Information and Intelligent Systems Division and the Library of Congress. Participants in the workshop included researchers working in the areas of digital archiving, metadata and information representation; digital libraries; storage media and distributed caching systems; information economics; Web harvesting; trusted systems and authentication; and computer security. Representatives from 10 federal agencies also participated and discussed issues of concern to government agencies with large data repositories as well as the need for coordination among government organizations with responsibility for long-term management of information resources in digital form.
The workshop goals included:
- Identify the research challenges in digital archiving and preservation;
- Set priorities for research based on input from stakeholders;
- Develop a compelling research agenda that will encourage qualified researchers to develop research projects that address this problem;
- Propose mechanisms that could build a community of researchers and foster cross-fertilization among research projects.
During the two-day workshop, participants listened to presentations and discussed four main topic areas:
- Architectures for persistent digital repositories;
- Attributes of archived digital collections;
- Policy and economic models;
- Tools and technologies for digital archiving.
A final discussion session focused on current priorities for research, future scenarios that might affect research priorities, the components of an infrastructure for long-term preservation and methods for transferring research into practical applications.
The Organizing Committee for the workshop consisted of Margaret Hedstrom, University of Michigan, Chair; Sharon Dawes, Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany; Carl Fleischhauer, Library of Congress; James Gray, Microsoft Research; Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information; Victor McCrary, National Institute of Standards and Technology; Reagan Moore, San Diego Supercomputer Center; Kenneth Thibodeau, National Archives and Records Administration; and Donald Waters, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
A summary report of the workshop with findings and recommendations will be available in June 2002. NSF, the Library of Congress and other government agencies will use the recommendations in the final report to mobilize resources for research and to develop solicitations for research projects. Additional information about the workshop is available at www.si.umich.edu/digarch.
