The New York Times Saving The Nation's Digital Legacy
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"The Library of Congress is charged with collecting the creative work of the American people. This has come to include such varied output as the papers of Thomas Jefferson and the Wright brothers, the original compositions of Leonard Bernstein and the video archives of the Martha Graham Dance Company.

But now the nation's creativity extends to Web sites, electronic journals and magazines, and CD-ROM's of every sort. And the library is lagging in collecting and archiving that digital material, according to a report released yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences. Unless its administrators act swiftly, the report says, the library risks diminishing in relevance."

redux [07.08.00]
CNN.Com Company aims to preserve Web history
"The Internet provides a unique glimpse into the lives of ordinary people, much like newspapers of old, but little is being done to preserve Web pages for future historians. One non-profit company is trying to change that.

"We have a shadow of the world that we're able to capture and make available to the future," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.

"Why save the entire Internet, when some would argue that most of it is junk?

Referring to newspapers of the past, Kahle said, "If we had been selective, we probably would have kept all the articles and thrown away those ads, but it's the ads that the historians really like. That's what of what life was like."

The Internet Archive Why the Archive Is Building an ‘Internet Library’
"Libraries exist to preserve society’s cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it’s essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world."

"The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet — a new medium with major historical significance — from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to permanently preserve a record of public material.

Open and free access to literature and other writings has long been considered essential to education and to the maintenance of an open society. Public and philanthropic enterprises have supported it through the ages.

The Internet Archive is opening its collections to researchers, historians, and scholars to ensure that they have free and permanent access to public materials. The Archive has no vested interest in the discoveries of the users of its collections, nor is it a grant-making organization."

Mappa Mundi Conceptual Map of Net Spaces - Circa'94
"It is important to realise that the Internet is not just the Web. Many people are unaware that the Internet in fact provides a rich array of services beyond those beginning with WWW. I'm a geographer so I like to think of these as different information spaces, with differing virtual 'geographies'. A good way to get a information spaces of the Internet, their shape, size, landmarks and interconnections, is to map them. One of my favourite conceptual maps of net spaces was drawn back in 1994 by John December."

"The map was drawn at the end of 1994 and the nature of the Internet has changed markedly since then, with certain information spaces dying off as they fall out of favour with users, particularly WAIS and Gopher. Undoubtedly, the biggest change has been the inexorable and exponential growth of Web space which would now be a huge blue blob on the map, squeezing and submerging many other information spaces. For many end-users the Web, seen through the browser interface, is the only information space, although e-mail is still the most widely used. But even here, the Web is coming to dominate with the growing popularity of Web-based e-mail services like Hotmail.

Other important information spaces within the global Internet have evolved and grown to prominence since December drew his map. Notable examples include, instant messaging (e.g. ICQ), chat environments (e.g. IRC), multi-user game spaces (e.g. Quake) and streaming media (e.g. RealNetworks, MP3s). Also, large intranets have proliferated, creating important private information spaces, which are largely unseen from the outside and are therefore difficult to quantify and map. While at the scale of the networks of the Matrix, John December commented to me, via e-mail, that since 1994 there has been "the swallowing up of all alternate networks into the Internet…everyone thinks of only the Internet as the online world.""

Council on Library and Information Sources Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation
"There is as yet no viable long-term strategy to ensure that digital information will be readable in the future. Digital documents are vulnerable to loss via the decay and obsolescence of the media on which they are stored, and they become inaccessible and unreadable when the software needed to interpret them, or the hardware on which that software runs, becomes obsolete and is lost. Preserving digital documents may require substantial new investments, since the scope of this problem extends beyond the traditional library domain, affecting such things as government records, environmental and scientific baseline data, documentation of toxic waste disposal, medical records, corporate data, and electronic-commerce transactions."

BBC Tiny disk to record posterity
"New ways of storing information in a way that can be understood thousands of years from now have been discussed at a conference in the United States.

Scientists, librarians, technologists, anthropologists and others, with the backing of the Long Now Foundation, are considering the best way to ensure that the culture and heritage of the 21st Century are not forgotten.

The foundation has developed a small metal disk which can store hundreds of thousands of words.

Called the Rosetta disk, experts hope it will provide our descendants with details of how we live today."

Council on Library and Information Resources Risk Management of Digital Information: A File Format Investigation
"This report is based on an investigation conducted by Cornell University Library to assess the risks to digital file formats during migration. The study was carried out with support from CLIR.

The report includes a workbook that will help library staff identify potential risks associated with migrating digital information. Each section of the workbook opens with a brief issue summary; this is followed by questions that will guide users in completing a risk assessment. The appendixes also include two case studies for migration: one for image files and the other for numeric files."