From Inside Higher Ed
Uphill Battle on Digital Preservation
By Steve Kolowich
WASHINGTON — In a report released in February, 17 librarians, scientists, and technologists spent 116 pages detailing the challenges of preserving culturally valuable digital artifacts. But at a symposium held Thursday to discuss the findings, it was perhaps Derek Law, chair of JISC Advance, a British advocate for technology in higher education, who articulated the problem most succinctly:
“If I put a book in [University of Oxford's] Bodleian Library, I know exactly what they’re going to do with it: they’re going to keep it forever, or at least as long as they can,” Law said. “If I give a file to the Oxford University computing center, I know what they’re going to do: They’re going to lose it within three months.”
For Law — who was one of the many preservationists to speak at the symposium, but probably the most colorful — this lack of faith in even higher education’s most august institutions to effectively preserve digital materials bespeaks an endemic crisis. And there is plenty of blame to go around....
Hal R. Varian, chief economist at Google and erstwhile professor at the University of California at Berkeley [School of Information], said that commercially owned content — such as television shows, radio broadcasts, and Web sites — could possibly be preserved by industry coalitions. It would not take much money, Varian said; the present issue with backing up culturally important broadcast content is not so much cost as a lack of interest.
Alternatively, the government could pass legislation defining the rights and responsibilities of an archive keeper vis-à-vis copyright, “then just let free entry take over,” Varian said. Under that scenario, for-profit archives could multiply like video rental stores of old, he said....