Blue Ribbon Task Force Takes on Issue of Preservation of Digital Information

The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Access, a coalition formed in 2007 by the National Science Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with the Library of Congress and other organizations, has issued a new report on the critical challenges of preserving an ever-increasing amount of digital information.

Valuable digital information, consisting of text, video, images, music, sensor data, etc. is growing at an exponential rate.  A recent study by the International Data Corporation found that a total of 3,892,179,868,480,350,000,000 (that's roughly 3.9 trillion times a trillion) new digital information bits were created in 2008. In the future, the digital universe is expected to double in size every 18 months.
While much has been written on the digital preservation issue as a technical challenge, the Blue Ribbon Task Force study focused on the economic aspect; i.e. how stewards of valuable, digitally-based information can pay for preservation over the longer term.

"Valuable digital information spans the spectrum from official e-documents to some YouTube videos. No one economic model will cost-effectively support them all, but all require cost-effective economic models," said Fran Berman, vice president for research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and co-chair of the Task Force.
The Blue Ribbon Task Force report focuses on four distinct scenarios, each having ever-increasing amounts of preservation-worthy digital assets in which there is a public interest in long-term preservation including: scholarly discourse, research data, commercially-owned cultural content (such as digital movies and music), and collectively produced Web content (such as blogs).

The Task Force issued recommendations concerning public policy, organizational and technical actions, public education and outreach regarding the topic.  

"Addressing the issues of value, incentives, and roles and responsibilities helps us understand who benefits from long-term access to digital materials, who should be responsible for preservation, and who should pay for it,” said Brian Lavoie, research scientist at OCLC and Task Force co-chair.

For more on the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Data Access and the complete report,see the release from OCLC