Preserving digital data is a costly and time-consuming task, especially when the amount of data keeps growing exponentially. A new group is tackling the problem with a two-year grant totaling $525,000 from the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Called the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation, the group is holding meetings in Washington, D.C., this week to discuss what it means to have an economically sustainable model for digital preservation, and various ways to achieve this.
The group is expected to issue two reports, one at the end of this year and one in 2009. Brian Lavoie, an economist who is a research scientist at the OCLC Online Computer Library Center, and Francine Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California at San Diego, are heading up the task force.
They said Monday that they hoped to have an outline for the first report by the end of this week. Ms. Berman said she was particularly concerned about the lack of attention paid to preserving data from research financed by the federal government.
The task force is working with the Library of Congress, Britain’s Joint Information Systems Committee, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the National Archives and Records Administration.—-Andrea L. Foster
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