Newswise — We rely on information stored in some kind of digital format on some sort of media to maintain our scholarly, legal, and cultural record and to continue to make progress with and profit from our digital labor. But the ephemeral nature of both data formats and storage media threatens our very ability to maintain economic, legal, and cultural continuity over time, not on the scale of centuries, but (considering the unrelenting pace of technological change) from one decade to the next.
Awareness of the problem is growing rapidly, especially in large organizations: as official government and corporate records become entirely digital, there are certain obligations to keep them around for future scrutiny. In the United States, for example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires that business records, including electronic records and e-mail, must be saved for "not less than five years." And in some industries, such as pharmaceuticals, the regulations for record retention are much longer--30 years or more.
These new requirements, along with an increasing dependence on digital content across the board, have spurred corporations, governments, and universities to devise or acquire ways to preserve just about everything stored as bits. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries are attacking the problem of maintaining and sharing digital content over the long haul with a project called DSpace. Librarians there joined with programmers for Hewlett-Packard to build an open-source software application that not only accepts digital materials and makes them available on the Web, but also puts them into a data management regime that helps preserve them. MIT and 100 other organizations worldwide, including Cornell University, the University of Toronto, the University of Cambridge (UK), the Australian National University, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology are actively using DSpace, with more institutions expected to create a DSpace archive this year.
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