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Repositories
Sun, Stanford Working To Archive History
7/2/2008
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The 180-plus participants, including librarians, academics, and technical storage experts, were part of the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group, or PASIG. It's an effort started a year ago by Sun Microsystems and Stanford University to address the immense and ongoing challenges of preserving and storing human knowledge.
It's critical to do this now, according to Art Pasquinelli, Sun's education market strategist and Sun PASIG organizer. First, Pasquinelli said, "we're finding that a lot of people are concerned about losing cultural heritage material.... Things are decaying, and we don't want to move these things any more than we have to." At the same time, he said, huge amounts of new digital content are created daily, raising urgent questions about how to manage and share massive data sets.
According to a 2007 report by research firm IDC, the amount of new digital information created, captured or replicated will grow sixfold in just four years, and the majority of the data will be created not by businesses, but by individuals or other "non-enterprises."
Enterprises and organizations, however, will be responsible for storing, securing, and protecting 85 percent of this new digital data, IDC predicted.
The sheer amount of information that implies means that experts will have to address technical issues around very large digital repositories, including data management and architecture, along with deciding where to locate the repositories and what formats and storage media to use.
It's a huge challenge that only gets bigger as the Internet distributes torrents of new content daily. Meanwhile, old paper documents, such as books and maps, get older and more fragile and shouldn't be transported any more than necessary.
What to save, who should have access, and what digital formats should be used--since computer file formats change over time--are some of the biggest issues that PASIG is addressing in ongoing discussions and sharing of best practices around archiving and preservation techniques.
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