Archives

Foxnews is carrying a Story on The 10,000-year Library Conference, hosted by The Long Now Foundation and Stanford University Libraries. They discussed how today\'s archival institutions will cope with preserving multimedia content such as digital audio and video files, photography, databases, Web pages and even links to related content. They say that most libraries are making a new \"digital library\" online, to preserve the information. This of course raises many new issues...

R Hadden wrote: \"Risk Management of Digital Information: A File Format Investigation.\" by Gregory W. Lawrence et al. It is impossible today to guarantee the longevity and legibility of digital information for even one human generation. The choices are: to physically preserve the format, to emulate the data, or to migrate the digital data. All these choices have risks. In 1998 the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) asked Cornell University to study the risk management for migrating several different common file formats. This report is the result of their studies, and is a practical guide to assess the risks associated with migrating electronic files in various formats. File migration is prone to generating errors, and this report provides practical tools to quantify these risks, get the .pdf file at
Clir.org

R Hadden Writes :

\"Risk Management of Digital Information: A File Format Investigation.\" by Gregory W. Lawrence et al. It is impossible today to guarantee the longevity and legibility of digital information for even one human generation. The choices are: to physically preserve the format, to emulate the data, or to migrate the digital data. All these choices have risks.

You can see the PDF file at Clir.org

R Hannden writes : \"An old work by Archimedes is
now a new work. An unique copy of a long-lost treatise
on mathematics by Archimedes has been discovered.
The 10th century manuscript, entitled \"Method,\" had
been erased and used as a prayer book for 12th
century monks, who preserved the work through the
centuries until it was re-discovered in 1881, then lost
again until only recently. Read the strange and
fascinating history of this curious and unique book in
the article by Reviel Netz, \"The Origins of Mathematical
Physics: New Light on an Old Question.\" Physics
Today, volume 53, number 6, pages 32-37, or available
online at: HREF=\"http://www.aip.org/pt/origins.htm\">aip.org

A story from the Guardian in the UK, Outlines an interesting new plan to enlist the public in the battle against mold and worms.

\"The library wants members of the public to commemorate a person\'s birth year or celebrate a birth, wedding anniversary or retirement by adopting a tome. \"

The Gaurdian in the UK has this story on the vast archive of the actor and director Laurence Olivier.

\"The British Library has acquired the vast archive of the actor and director Laurence Olivier, it announced yesterday.
The avalanche of paper reveals a man who knew he was marked for greatness and began to hoard evidence for his life history from his early teenage years.\"

news.excite.com carried a story on
Hewlett-Packard and the MIT Libraries.
They announced a $1.8 million joint project to build a digital archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that could serve as a model for other universities.

The archive will be capable of holding the approximately 10,000 articles produced by MIT authors annually, including a large amount of multimedia content.

The Boston Herald was one of many papers in the U.S. to pick up on this story.

A group of historians and librarians who oppose a rule that lets federal agencies destroy computer records as long as they keep a copy on paper or microfilm lost a Supreme Court appeal today.

The court, without comment, turned away an appeal in which the librarians and historians argued that paper records cannot be searched and indexed as easily as electronic records.

David Fiander writes \"The folks over at slashdot are getting all excited about a a story about a new paper out of UMich that talks about the problems of data preservation in the digital age. As if it\'s a new problem, and not just a seriously exacerbated one \"

From Slashdot\"Recently there was an Ask Slashdot about the the problem of preserving digital material. The basic idea was that we are creating a massive wealth of digital information, but have no clear plan for preserving it. What happens to all of those poems I write when I try to access them for my grandkids? What about the pictures of my kids I took with that digital camera? Can I still get to them in time to embarrass them in the future?

The BBC has a story on how computers will start to decompose with important records.

Vital archaeological records could be
lost forever because the computers
they are stored on become quickly
obsolete.

The physical site is nearly always
completely destroyed during a dig,
but archaeologists claim the
knowledge they glean from the
ground is then available for posterity.
\"The irony is that archaeological
information held in magnetic format
is decaying faster than it ever did in
the ground,\" warns William Kilbride of
the Archaeology Data Service (ADS)
at the University of York.

Boston.com has an exciting archivist
Story on the troubles facing todays archivists.

Actually, the biggest problem is one scholars and archivists already confront. It\'s not an excess of access but the reverse. For the wonderful world of digitized information and on line everything has a dark archival underbelly: The more sophisticated information technology becomes, and the more readily accessible in the present, the harder it is to preserve and the less accessible it becomes in the future.

Infodude writes \"To assuage fears about the permanence of articles published in electronic journals, Stanford University researchers will test a computerized variation on an age-old archiving strategy:
Make lots of copies, and keep them in different locations.

http://www.chronicle.com/free/2000/02/2000021001t.htm \"

gsandler writes "

Here is a
story from the New York Times on the discovery by the Library of Congress of a
previously unknown recording of the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane.
There are very few recordings of this period of John Coltrane's career. "During this period, Coltrane fully collected himself as an improviser, challenged by Monk and the discipline of his unusual harmonic sense. Thus began the 10-year sprint during which he changed jazz completely, before his death in 1967."
(Registration at the NY Times web site is required.)

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