Sustainable economics for a digital planet: ensuring long term access to digital information

The final report of Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access was released recently. http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Final_Report.pdf (PDF; 120 p.)

From the preface, p. 7:

"If there is one finding that perhaps merits special attention, it is that sustainable economics for digital preservation is not just about finding more funds. It is about building an economic activity firmly rooted in a compelling value proposition, clear incentives to act, and well-defined preservation roles and responsibilities. Lacking these ingredients, digital preservation efforts—and the materials in their care—have little prospect of persisting over time; with them, our digital heritage will have a sound economic foundation for the future."

Some key points.

1. the scale of digital creation is far outpacing the capacity to store the data (by 2012 there will be 2.5 million petrabytes of data and just over 1 million petrabytes of storage.

2. 3 critical questions:

What digital information should we preserve?
Who will preserve it?
Who will pay for it?

3. 4 information types considered

scholarly discourse
research data
commercially owned cultural content
collectively created Web content

4. difference between traditional preservation and digital preservation

In contrast to traditional preservation, digital preservation is a dynamic process with multiple actions taken over the course of the digital lifecycle.

code4lib 2010

Just back from code4lib 2010 in Asheville, North Carolina. A few quick comments today--mostly about the 2 keynote talks. Cathy Marshall, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, and Paul Jones, ibiblio, etc., each gave an excellent talk. Marshall's ethnographic investigation into people's behaviors over time with their digital stuff (especially with respect to keeping or not keeping it) was a fun and thought-provoking start to the conference. Her work points to complexities with the intersection of keeping and losing, discovering and remembering, neglect and curation.

Jones' talk built in part on Robin Dunbar's anthropological studies of primates' behavior in building and maintaining social relationships. His work shows how human urge to relate to one another drives what we know and act on. He noted the shift in the past year from Web use driven by search engine results to Web use driven by recommendations via social networks. It's all about how the power of small talk--gossip--to build trusted relationships among people drives how we think and act.

Marshall's talk keeps recurring to me as I think about preservation, discovery, and use of our shared digital stuff. How do Marshall's insights into how we actually behave with our own digital stuff affect our thinking and actions as institutions preserving digital stuff for later reuse?

Jones' talk keeps recurring to me as I think about how libraries might facilitate discovery and use of information by focusing on social networks rather than search tools. What would happen if we thought of a catalog as part of a social networking environment and not as an isolated search engine?

The many talks varied a lot in character, topic, approach, and quality. As a whole, they were good to excellent presentations, and aggregated like this they presented a snapshot of where the coder and librarian intersect is now. The lightning talks work well to diminish the distinction between active presenters and passive audiences. Dan Chudnov's ask anything hour worked well, too. The key to code4lib is "only connect." The conference became a kind of exemplar of Jones' point about how we create trusted relationships and thus think and act individually as members of small groups.

Overall, my first time at code4lib was great. Gathering this community together is a powerful catalyst for development within the library domain.

Portico certified as trustworthy by CLR using TRAC checklist

Portico certified as trustworthy by Center for Research Libraries (CLR)using Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC) checklist.

See the brief (8p.)CLR report at
http://www.crl.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/CRL%20Report%20on%20Portico%20Audit%202010.pdf

Portico http://www.portico.org is a not-for-profit digital preservation service. Portico is a dark archive (and that presents some issues of concern for the audit process.) Portico, like JSTOR, is part of ITHAKA, http://www.thaka.org a not-for-profit organization

CRL http://www.crl.org is an international consortium or university, college and independent research libraries.

Portico is looking like a good choice for a domain-wide digital preservation repository that should save libraries and their host institutions from the burdens of doing digital preservation locally.

Carr's Big Switch redux

I'm about 1/2 done with Big Switch, and its good.

Carr's thesis is that information services (hardware and software) are now and increasingly operating on the scale of the electrical power utilities. Just as companies don't generally create their own power, they now no longer need their own IT depts. As network access speeds and reliability approach that available on one's own computer, the network itself becomes one big machine. He's look at and past things like Amazon's EC2 "elastic computing cloud" that allows companies to use Amazon's computers (H&S) as if they were their own. Another example is 3Tera's AppLogic, a cloud computing platform.The customer pays for the computing power consumed when they consume it--just like we pay for electricity. Wow!

Carr briefly highlight large-scale consequences of the electrical gridon society and suggests that similarly large-scale effects will follow from the utilitization of computing. I think he's right. Consider the consequences of large-scale, utility-style cloud computing on digital preservation. If say higher education institutions outsource their computing utility-style to global third-party providers, then preservation of the digital content (an oxymoron; what we mean is curation of digital content over time via migrations) also moves to the third party. There the scale is much larger, part of the ongoing access to content, and costs to individual institutions is amortized across the aggregate of all the institutions using the third party computing utility. In short, indiviual institutions (here colleges and universities) need not themselves directly work to preserve their digital content. They have out-sourced it to their computing utility. It (digital curation--my prefered phrase for digital preservation) still has to be done but not repeatedly at a local (say we call it--retail) level. There are many trust issues here, but then most of us trust our utilities now for water and power.

Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch.

I've just started reading Nicholas Carr's new book, The Big Switch. He claims information is the new electricity--a utility-based commodity that powers the economy. The sub-title, Rewiring the world, from Edison to Google gives one a sense of its scope.