Preservation Ruminations

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Preservation Ruminations
Digital preservation and the unfamiliar
future Priscilla Caplan Florida Center for
Library Automation
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Outline

• The need for digital preservation
• Some preservation basics
• Some preservation problems
• A handful of implications
• roles
• rights
• community values

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• THE NEED FOR DIGITAL PRESERVATION
• Number of academic/scholarly journals published
  online 15,757
• Number of serials published only electronically
  4600
• Percent of U.S. federal government publications
  produced exclusively online in 2003 65 percent
• Estimated percent of U.S. federal government
  publications available exclusively online by
  2008 90 percent
• Mostly from California Digital Library
  http//www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/preservation/
  

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Some Preservation Basics
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Media issues life expectancy, obsolescence,
degradation
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Format issues obsolescence, obsolescence,
obsolescence
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Duration in years of PDF versions (as of 3/03)
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(No Transcript)
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Some Preservation Problems
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THE PROBLEM OF ABUNDANCE
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• THE PROBLEM OF EPHEMERALITY
• Percent of web-based references in scientific
  articles from 3 major journals inaccessible
  within 2 years of publication 21
• Proportion of websites in 1998 gone in 1999 44
• Life of an average website 44 days

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THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY
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Some Implications

• Roles
• Rights
• Community values

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Changing roles
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CHANGING RIGHTS
Access v. ownership No help from DMCA Contracts
must grant the right to preserve But what is the
right to preserve anyway?
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UNCHANGING VALUES
Democracy Stewardship Service Intellectual
freedom Privacy Literacy and learning