Survival of Digital Information
This item about the lifespan of digital information looks like it’s worth a read. British Library and Joint Information Systems Committee Partnership Manager at the British Library Neil Beagrie talks about the survival of information in electronic formats. “[D]igital information will never survive and remain accessible by accident: it requires ongoing active management.”
It reminds me of the points the presenters during the Archiving Update session at the Special Libraries Association 2004 Annual Conference made, especially a quote Rob Robinson of National Public Radio used: "Digital information lasts forever, or for five years. Whichever comes first" attributed to Jeff Rothenberg.
Noticed on the ResourceShelf
August 12th, 2004 at 1:49 pm
The petabox project at the Internet Archive is an interesting one in this area. A project to build a petabyte, a million gigabytes, storage system for digital archives. The discussion posts reveal some of the approaches they are taking to try to keep the data intact. Possibly of interest will be this discussion of the BBC Archive requirement for ten petabytes of storage to cope with the material they currently store on 85km of shelves. Thinking in terms of how many terrabytes per km of shelf storage replaced is interesting.