Re: a preservation experience

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

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