Re: Your views on digital preservation

["Stephen O. Knopp" <clannagael32@yahoo.com>]

Colin,

I thought you might find the following something of interest:

"Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial 
comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and 
nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits 0's 
and 1's written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of 
which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. 
Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of 
technology can mean that the older equipment and software that 
can make sense of all those 0's and 1's simply don't exist 
anymore.

"Imagine having a record but no record player.

"All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying 
to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are 
puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and 
how to make that material accessible."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html


From: "MEDDINGS, Colin" <colin.meddings@oxfordjournals.org>
To: "liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu" <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Mon, March 15, 2010 5:43:05 PM
Subject: Your views on digital preservation

- with apologies for cross posting -

Oxford University Press is conducting some research into digital 
preservation and we are interested in the views of librarians 
like yourself on this topic. In particular, we would like to know 
your thoughts on the long term preservation of content which you 
have licensed - how important this is to you, who should assume 
responsibility, and how should the process be funded.

Colin Meddings

Senior Library Marketing Manager
Oxford Journals | Oxford University Press
Great Clarendon Street
Oxford, OX2 6DP