Excuse Me... Some Digital Preservation Fallacies?
Buzz
Excuse me…
I have been asked to write an article for the tenth anniversary of
Ariadne, a venture that I have enjoyed, off and on, since its inception in 1996 as part of the eLib Programme, of which I was then Programme Director.
Some years ago I wrote an article entitled “After eLib” [1] for
Ariadne. The original suggestion was for a follow-up “even more after eLib”; however, I now work for JISC, and that probably makes it hard to be objective!
In “After eLib”, I wrote this paragraph about digital preservation:
“Back to the Electronic Libraries Programme, what were some of my favourite projects (I won’t say best; this is definitely a subjective list)? The project of greatest personal satisfaction for me is CEDARS [2], the digital preservation project. Ensuring the long-term existence of digital materials was not an element of the Follett report, and this seemed a significant gap when I started thinking about applying for the job of Programme Director. Others were also aware of the importance of this area, most particularly FIGIT’s Chair, Lynne Brindley, now CEO of the British Library. We still have CEDARS as an exploratory project piloting ideas (which together with its JISC/NSF-funded companion, CAMiLEON [3] has a high international profile) rather than a full-blown digital preservation service; this is another example of the difficulty of taking even widely supported ideas through research into service. It is also true that the technical problems in this area are not yet solved, but also that the real problems are organisational and political rather than technical. I hope that in this interim period our consciousness of the problem is raised enough that temporary expedients will be found so that little of importance will be lost.”