Re: a preservation experience

[Keith Seitter <kseitter@ametsoc.org>]

I have also been giving a lot of thought to Eileen Fenton's excellent
message.

It seems to me that the fundamental issue embedded here for a long-term
archiving solution (or solutions) is the need for one or more business
models that can lead to stable long-term funding for the effort.  This is
not to dismiss the technological issues (or the other issues on Eileen's
list) surrounding this topic, but to suggest that we have made more
progress in identifying possible technological solutions than we have in
outlining business models that result in a steady and adequate flow of
resources to the institutions and organizations that we will be relying on
to preserve the content for future generations.

What I am really struggling with now is how to reconcile the need for a
sustainable funding model for the archive with the recent, and
understandable, push for open access publishing.  I'm sure we all see the
value of open access for the communities we serve, just as we understand
the critical need for preservation of that content.  The business models
that provide for open access publishing may not be mutually exclusive with
the business models that would help to support a long-term archive, but I
am having trouble imagining a framework that provides for both.

Keith Seitter
Deputy Executive Director
American Meteorological Society

At 09:23 PM 11/3/2003 -0500, you wrote:
> I've been thinking about Eileen Fenton's posting a lot, as have others
> who've contributed.  Her thoughts seemed so sensible and on-point that to
> add anything would be "gilding the lily."  As I reviewed her list of
> attributes for a trustworthy archive and considered our current landscape,
> my takeaways were:
>
> o National libraries are not sufficient to accomplish the large task that
> lies before us, for various reasons:  there may not be enough of them
> ready, willing, able, and funded to do so to create adequate redundancy
> for the content we (whoever the "we" in any given case may be) desire to
> preserve; their taxpayer funding source(s) may or may not be reliable over
> time.  I.e., however highly we regard this type of archive, such as the
> BL, we need more diversity and numbers of archives.
>
> o We probably need private organizations as well, preferably
> not-for-profit privates, based on a business plan that's sustainable over
> a very long time.  There is not a long enough history of such
> organizations ... so far .. so it's hard to imagine them at the moment. In
> fact, most of our organizations such as libraries and publishers do not
> have even a 100-year history, though some do...and few of these are the
> organizations rushing towards the e-archiving role.
>
> o Today no organization exists that meets all of Ms. Fenton's
> trustworthiness criteria.  That is a sobering insight.
>
> As she concludes, there is a Big Job to be done.
>
> Ann Okerson/liblicense-l moderator
> ann.okerson@yale.edu