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Report of Task Force on Sustainable Digital
Preservation
The final report of the Task Force on Sustainable Digital
Preservation (of which I am a member) is now available, and can be
found at at the Task Force's web site, http://brtf.sdsc.edu.
I've also reproduced a press release regarding the report below.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
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Blue Ribbon Task Force Report:
Preserving Our Digital Knowledge Base
Must be a Public Priority
Dollars Won't Do It Alone: Deluge of
Digital Data Needs Economically Sustainable Plans
Addressing one of the most urgent
societal challenges of the Information Age - ensuring that valued
digital information will be accessible not just today, but in the
future - requires solutions that are at least as much economic and
social as technical, according to a new report by a Blue Ribbon Task
Force.
The Final Report from the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable
Digital Preservation and Access, called "Sustainable Economics for a
Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-term Access to Digital Information",
is the result of a two-year effort focusing on the critical
economic challenges of preserving an ever-increasing amount of
information in a world gone digital. The full report is available
online at
http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Final_Report.pdf .
"The
Data Deluge is here. Ensuring that our most valuable information
is available both today and tomorrow is not just a matter of finding
sufficient funds," said Fran Berman, vice president for research at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and co-chair of the Task Force.
"It's about creating a "data economy" in which those who care,
those who will pay, and those who preserve are working in
coordination."
The challenge in preserving valuable digital information - consisting
of text, video, images, music, sensor data, etc. generated throughout
all areas of our society - is real and growing at an exponential pace.
A recent study by the International Data Corporation (IDC) found that
a total of 3,892,179,868,480,350,000,000 (that's roughly 3.9 trillion
times a trillion) new digital information bits were created in 2008.
In the future, the digital universe is expected to double in size
every 18 months, according to the IDC report.
While much has been written on the digital preservation issue as a
technical challenge, the Blue Ribbon Task Force report focuses on the
economic aspect; i.e. how stewards of valuable, digitally-based
information can pay for preservation over the longer term. The report
provides general principles and actions to support long-term economic
sustainability; context-specific recommendations tailored to specific
scenarios analyzed in the report; and an agenda for priority actions
and next steps, organized according to the type of decision maker best
suited to carry that action forward. Moreover, the report is intended
to serve as a foundation for further study in this critical area.
In addition to releasing its report, the Task Force earlier this month
announced plans for a one-day symposium to provide a forum for
discussion on economically sustainable digital preservation practices.
The symposium, to be held April 1 in Washington D.C., will include a
spectrum of national leaders from the Executive Office of the
President of the United States, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, the Smithsonian Museum, Nature Magazine, Google, and other
organizations for whom digital information is fundamental for
success.
Value, Incentives, and Roles & Responsibilities
The report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force focuses on four distinct
scenarios, each having ever-increasing amounts of preservation-worthy
digital assets in which there is a public interest in long-term
preservation: scholarly discourse , research data,
commercially-owned cultural content (such as digital movies and
music), and collectively-produced Web content (such as blogs).
"Valuable digital information spans the spectrum from official
e-documents to some YouTube videos. No one economic model will
cost-effectively support them all, but all require cost-effective
economic models," said Berman, who was director of the San Diego
Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego,
before joining Rensselaer last year.
The report
categorizes the economics of digital preservation into three
"necessary conditions" closely aligned with the needs of
stakeholders: recognizing the value of data and selecting
materials for longer-term preservation; providing incentives
for decision makers to preserve data directly or provide preservation
services for others; and articulating the roles and
responsibilities among those involved in the preservation process.
The report further aligns those conditions with the basic economic
principle of supply and demand, and warns that without
well-articulated demand for access to preserved digital assets, there
will be no supply of preservation services.
"Addressing the issues of value, incentives, and roles and
responsibilities helps us understand who benefits from long-term
access to digital materials, who should be responsible for
preservation, and who should pay for it," said Brian Lavoie,
research scientist at OCLC and Task Force co-chair. "Neglecting to
account for any of these conditions significantly reduces the
prospects of achieving sustainable digital preservation activities
over the long run."
Task Force Recommendations
The Blue Ribbon panel report cites several specific
recommendations for decision makers and stakeholders to consider as
they seek economically sustainable preservation practices for digital
information. While the report covers these recommendations in detail,
below is a summary listing key areas of priority for near-term
action:
Organizational Action
o
develop public-private
partnerships, similar to ones formed by the Library of Congress
o ensure that organizations have access to
skilled personnel, from domain experts to legal and business
specialists
o
create and sustain secure chains
of stewardship between organizations over the long term
o
achieve economies of scale and
scope wherever possible
Technical Action
o build capacity to support stewardship in all
areas
o
lower the costs of preservation
overall
o
determine the optimal level of
technical curation needed to create a flexible strategy for all types
of digital material
Public Policy Action
o
modify copyright laws to enable
digital preservation
o create incentives and requirements for private
entities to preserve on behalf of the public (financial incentives,
handoff requirements)
o
sponsor public-private
partnerships
o
clarify rights issues associated
with Web-based materials
Education and Public Outreach Action
o promote education and training for 21st century
digital preservation (domain-specific skills, curatorial best
practices, core competencies in relevant science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics knowledge)
o
raise awareness of the urgency to
take timely preservation actions
The report concluded that sustainable preservation strategies are not
built all at once, nor are they static.
"The environment in which digital preservation takes place can be
very dynamic," said OCLC's Brian Lavoie. "Priorities change,
policies change, stakeholders change. A key element of a robust
sustainability strategy is to anticipate the effect of these changes
and take steps to minimize the risk that long-term preservation goals
will be impacted by short-term disruptions in resources, incentives,
and other economic factors. If we can do this, we will have gone a
long way toward ensuring that society's valuable digital content does
indeed survive."
About the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital
Preservation and Access
The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and
Access was launched in late 2007 by the National Science Foundation
and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with the Library
of Congress, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the United
Kingdom, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the
National Archives and Records Administration. The Task Force was
commissioned to explore the economic sustainability challenge of
digital preservation and access. An Interim report discussing
the economic context for preservation, Sustaining the Digital
Investment: Issues and Challenges of Economically Sustainable
Digital Preservation, is available at the Task Force
website, http://brtf.sdsc.edu . Please visit
the website for more information about the Task Force and its upcoming
symposium, called A National Conversation on the Economic
Sustainability of Digital Information, to take place April 1, 2010
in Washington D.C. A similar symposium will be held in the United
Kingdom on May 6, 2010, at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre,
in London. Space is limited so early registration is advised.
More information is available at
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/preservation/BRTFUKSymposium.aspx.
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