[Esip-preserve] [FoRCnet.org] Article in The New Yorker on Missing Documents

Herbert Van de Sompel via Esip-preserve esip-preserve at lists.esipfed.org
Tue Dec 2 12:24:00 EST 2014


And, of course, all these archives should be accessible via the Memento protocol RFC 7089): original URI + datetime = temporally appropriate archived version from whichever archive holds it. 

Herbert

> On Dec 2, 2014, at 19:00, Chris Shaffer <shafferc at ohsu.edu> wrote:
> 
> This is the driving reason for the LOCKSS initiative (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe). That model can, and should, be leveraged for research data and other digital formats.
> 
> http://www.lockss.org/
> 
> Chris
> 
> --
> Chris Shaffer, MS, AHIP
> University Librarian and Associate Professor
> Oregon Health & Science University Library
> shafferc at ohsu.edu 503-494-6057
> Skype: chris.shaffer
> http://www.ohsu.edu/library/
> 
>> On Dec 2, 2014, at 8:06 AM, Bruce Barkstrom <brbarkstrom at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> There's an interesting article in the current New Yorker:
>> 
>> Lapore, J., 2014: The Great Paper Caper: When Supreme Court file go missing,
>> The New Yorker, Dec. 1, 2014, 32-38
>> 
>> It recounts the theft of the original and authentic papers
>> of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter from the
>> Library of Congress sometime before November, 1972.
>> 
>> While these papers are not Earth science documents, the
>> theft does seem to raise the issue of having a single point
>> of failure in an archival system.  An alternative is to recognize
>> that replication of original objects is a valid strategy for reducing
>> loss, even if there is no single agency or organization devoted
>> to retaining the unique, authentic original copy.
>> 
>> A complicating issue for digital objects is the near certainty
>> of hardware and software obsolescence.  The latter can render
>> an original object (even if carefully maintained) unusable,
>> often on a time span of the three to ten year period for software
>> tools to be deprecated and effectively unusable.
>> 
>> It may be that we need to have a community discussion about
>> strategies for preserving digital information content even when
>> the bits are rearranged by transformational migration and are
>> stored in multiple places.
>> 
>> Bruce B.
>> 
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