SunSite at Berkeley

[Marc Salomon]

|I would be very interested to hear of anyone who has made provisions for
|long-term preservation of digital material except for stating *intent*.

We are addressing these issues now.

In the old publishing model, the bulk of capital was involved in production and
distribution of information on paper which physically sat on a shelf somewhere
and could be read for hundreds of years.  Nice closed, solvable problem.  A
little dusting, some glue, binding and we're set.

Now, that most money involved in publishing must be spent to guarantee
information persistence including a data format migration path into the
unknown, some new issues present:

1.  Data formats.  We're all in trouble if the volume of data increases faster
than the access time of storage media and/or processing power for format
conversion.  Backing this stuff up as volume grows is an expensive,
time-consuming process.

2.  Data integrity.  In our subject domain, medical information, scientific
errata, either introduced in original content or obsoleted by new developments
and findings, can kill people.  Thus, we need to treat data that we originate
with the same editorial analysis as a peer-reviewed journal would in order to
assure that the science meets base standards.

that's all for right now...

-marc

-- 
--/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
// Marc Salomon - Software Engineer - Innovative Software Systems Group     \\ 
\\ Library and Center for Knowledge Management - UC, San Francisco          // 
// phone :  415.476.9541 - e-mail : marc at ckm.ucsf.edu - fax: 415.476.4653   \\
\\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\<URL:http://www.ckm.ucsf.edu/marc/>/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\///