How can we be sure we'll remember our digital past?
As technology evolves, data from outmoded machines is put at risk; panel addresses pathways and costs.
from the February 14, 2008 edition
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For example, after one year of photographing the night sky, LSST will likely produce more digital information on space than all past efforts combined, says Berman.
"So, again, who will pay for this?" asks Berman. "I don't expect being able to tell anyone in two years that it will be free."
A pay model?
While panel members are careful not to discuss possible recommendations in too much detail this early in the project, several of them mentioned basic economic models for making data accessible and sustainable.
They include an iTunes-style pay-per-use model, where users would be charged to download old books, census data, etc.; a privatized model, where businesses that already host pictures or files online agree to keep them for decades into the future; or a public-good model, where governments or endowments fund preservation.
"I think it's unlikely that we'll map out, 'Well, this fee structure will go to this kind of data and this model is for this industry,'" says Amy Friedlander, who serves on the task force and is director of programs at the Council on Library and Information Resources in Washington. "We should assume there will be a mix of strategies, because no model is mutually exclusive."
Deciding which files are worth saving is a judgment call the panel will leave to the community.
While the task force spends the next two years reflecting, many other alliances will be researching the problem as well.
At the same time that it's funding the Blue Ribbon Task Force, the National Science Foundation has offered $100 million for five organizations to design a "DataNet" for sustainable data preservation "over a decades-long timeline."
Across the Atlantic, the European Union launched its own push for preservation in June 2006.
Known as Planets, the four-year effort by several national libraries hopes to save the $4.3 billion worth of European data that's "at risk of digital obsolescence," reports the project.
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