October 13, 2004, 9:57 am
The Afterlife of Digital Information
by d/D
Filed under: Scholarly Publishing, Technology
A recent story on National Public Radio describes a Library of Congress’ initiative to preserve digital information that can propagate, change, and disappear without a trace. As of December 2000, the Internet, just one digital medium, had more than 4 Billion Web pages whose average life was 44 days.
Speaking to NPR’s Robert Siegel, Laura Campbell of the Library of Congress compared the repository to government photography archives from World War II:
“We can’t collect everything but we can certainly take a snapshot in time to tell the story about what local life was like…. We will have people who go through and sample what’s on the Web so that we can create that same kind of archive.”
http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=4062797
The Digital Preservation Program web site describes the breadth of the the undertaking. Projects range from the technical development of Web archiving tools to the funding of specific archives to the defining of metadata standards:
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