Re: EPA Set to Close Library Network and Electronic Catalog [PMC and digital preservation thread]

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

Are we confusing short term archiving and long term preservation 
involving migration or some other approach to changing 
technologisies especially if the article includes multimedia 
components? I am not complaining about PMC but other 
organisations particularly national libraries in most countries 
seem to me to have a different philosophy - perhaps because it is 
their mission. The article referred to below (do not forget to 
delete the comma at the end of the reference) explains its 
preservation approach as follows:

"For proprietary file formats such as PDFs and Microsoft Excel 
spreadsheets, PMC's current approach is to assume that other 
technology groups will continue to provide tools that make them 
usable because of their ubiquity.

NLM believes that the best way to ensure the durability of an 
electronic archive is to use it constantly. Because PMC creates 
its online displays directly from the archival files, as 
illustrated in Figure 2, readers are confirming and validating 
the quality of the archival files every time they retrieve an 
article. This adds another level of assurance to NLM's own 
testing and quality control procedures".

If that is enough why do the libraries mentioned worry so much 
and spend so much money in researching long-term preservation 
techniques?

Anthony

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kiley ,Mr Robert" <r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2006 10:58 PM
Subject: RE: EPA Set to Close Library Network and Electronic Catalog [PMC
and digital preservation thread]

> I don't think anyone can say NLM isn't serious about digital 
> preservation. An article on PMC in the ARL Bimonthly Report,
>
> http://www.arl.org/newsltr/228/pubmed.html, shows that PMC 
> began archiving journal source files in 2000. NLM was probably 
> the first to do this effectively in practice.
>
> Further, NLM's journal archiving DTD has been adopted by 
> Portico as well as by Blackwell, Wiley and NPG as the 
> interchange medium for their journal archives.
>
> NLM is now making sure it isn't an exclusive archive by 
> actively helping to create other international archives that 
> will use PMC's technology. The UKPMC project (being led by the 
> Wellcome Trust, but developed in partnership with a number of 
> UK-biomedical research funding bodies) is an example of this, 
> and I understand that there are several others in the works.
>
> Robert Kiley
> Head of e-strategy
> Wellcome Library
> Wellcome Trust