This week in Washington, DC, the Library of Congress is gathering its “Digital Preservation Partners” for a three-day session — one of a number of such meetings the library has been holding under a broad initiative called the “National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.” Its multi-year mission is “to develop a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations.”
It’s what Dan Gillmor of Salon calls a non-trivial task, for all kinds of technical, social and legal reasons. But it’s about as important for our future as anything I can imagine. We are creating vast amounts of information, and a lot of it is not just worth preserving but downright essential to save. Gillmor’s role this week, and at a workshop he joined last year, is to be thinking about the news.
good luck
wasn’t there just a Washington Post article that said we can’t keep up with all the possible intelligence data online, and this is with HUGE military budgets… what does the LoC expect to preserve? a handful of tweets and a video of a cat playing the piano?