Abstract
Digital technology ... has spawned a surfeit of information that is extremely fragile, inherently impermanent, and difficult to assess for long-term value. ... [I]t is increasingly difficult for libraries to identify what is of value, to acquire it, and to ensure its longevity over time.
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References
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According to a trade article, Kodak manages more than 1 billion images for 23 million online users. In 2006, vendors are offering NAS stores larger than 500 terabytes (5x 1014 bytes) and are pressed by customers for even larger fast storage arrays that are robust and easily managed. Apicello 2006, The New NAS: Fast, cheap, scalable, http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/06/15/78995_25FEnascluster_1.html.
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Consider the implications of C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, 1959. The slim volume documents a 1995 Cambridge University lecture. “as one moves through intellectual society from the physicists to the literary intellectuals, there are all kinds of tones of feeling on the way. But I believe the pole of total incomprehension of science radiates its influence on all the rest. That total incomprehension gives, much more pervasively than we realise, living in it, an unscientific flavour to the whole ‘traditional’ culture, and that unscientific flavour is often, much more than we admit, on the point of turning antiscientific. The feelings of one pole become the anti-feelings of the other. If the scientists have the future in their bones, then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist. It is the traditional culture, to an extent remarkably little diminished by the emergence of the scientific one, which manages the western world.” (p. 7)
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Among symptoms of pessimism, the supposed high cost is noteworthy. “Imagine a digital world in which [books] had recently been invented. You are head of information services for a major research university (providing all those services digitally...), and have to persuade your Vice-Chancellor to invest in a new facility for [books], maybe a couple of million of them (only a fraction of the numbers of objects in your digital stores). You can probably script the interview yourself... ‘You want a special building with 10 floors, with huge floor loadings and a special environment? You want 200 staff? You want how many million pounds? And after all that, the users have to go into the facility to access these books? You must be kidding me; get out of my sight!’” Rusbridge 2006, Some Digital Preservation Fallacies
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A more balanced assessment is The Political Economy of Public Goods in Waters 2002, Good Archives Make Good Scholars.
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Battin 1992, Substitution: the American Experience, quoted in http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub82/pub82text.html. See also A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections, http://www.niso.org/framework/Framework2.html.
Quoted in Talbot 2005, The Fading Memory of the State, http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/07/issue/feature_memory.asp.
See MegaNet’s Online Backup Market Research at http://www.meganet.net/pdfs/onlinebkresearch.pdf.
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(2007). Economic Trends and Social Issues. In: Preserving Digital Information. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-37887-7_2
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