The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access has published a new report titled ‘Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-term Access to Digital Information’. The report says that a key societal challenge of the Information Age is to ensure that valued digital information will be accessible not just today, but in the future. This requires solutions that are at least as much economic and social as technical, the report points out.
The study 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.
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. It provides general principles and actions to support long-term economic sustainability; context-specific recommendations tailored to specific scenarios analysed in the report; and an agenda for priority actions and next steps, organised 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 area.
In addition to releasing its report, the Task Force earlier this month announced plans for a one-day symposium, to be held on April 1 in Washington D.C. The symposium will include various representatives from the Executive Office of the US President, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Smithsonian Museum, Nature Magazine, Google, and other organisations for whom digital information is fundamental for success.
The Blue Ribbon Task Force report focuses on four distinct scenarios. Each has vast 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).
The report categorises the economics of digital preservation into three ‘necessary conditions’ closely aligned with the needs of stakeholders: recognising 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.
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.
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