Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the News category.
UNC resident Nobel Laureate talks on media storage problems
This Daily Tar Heel article spotlights a lecture given by Nobel Laureate, Oliver Smithies, professor in the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at UNC. Smithies won the Nobel for his work with gene targeting in 2007. While most of the lecture attendees were expecting a talk on this work, Smithies surprised them apparently with a sobering discussion of the problems with outdated storage media.
..he brought a collection of his old notebooks to the event, along with a floppy disk, CD and other storing devices.
“They’re all going to be out of date,” Smithies said regarding the CD and the floppy disk.
“We have to get that information down somewhere. That’s the problem with information science that you have to think about.”
We still have so much work to do in order to preserve access to data on an institutional level, but I am wondering what, besides nagging people to keep their data moving, can we do to ameliorate the problem for the individual? And I just get the chills anytime someone advises the greater population that the best way to preserve digital information is to “print it out.” Chills.
More links
Video Paradiso: how an Italian town rescued a priceless film collection
This is just a neat story that shows how what a community cares about can affect the longevity of an archive.
David Rosenthal on format specifications
Good stuff that I need to read again.
Discussion summary on format specifications
from Chris Rusbridge’s digital curation blog
Image Fortress Launches Online Archive of World’s Space Exploration Imagery
Neat. They claim to provide organizations with a “fully automated, online digital archiving services that ensure the secure, long-term preservation and integrity of electronic documents and still and video imagery.” I am deeply curious to know how they accomplish this.
German lovers – aged six and five – try to elope to Africa
This snuck into my delicious archives. Adorable.
In the news and stories of data loss
As part of my research, I think it is relevant to collect stories of data loss as well as to somewhat document the increasing number of data preservation stories in the news. Data loss stories help gauge the relevancy of work in digital preservation and curation, and the prevalence of news stories gauges the growth of public awareness of the problem. Look for more of these posts under the categories of ‘Data Loss Story’, and ‘News.’
Here is a news story involving data loss and the importance of preservation from the Christian Science Monitor:
