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Repositories
Sun, Stanford Working To Archive History
7/2/2008
Along with Sun and Stanford, participants in Sun PASIG include The Alberta Library, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, The British Library, The California Digital Library, Getty Research, The Johns Hopkins University, Oregon State University, University of Oxford, Swedish National Library, and Texas Digital Library.
The effort to share information and best practices on archiving and digital preservation is being spearheaded by Sun, which has a vested interest in storage technologies for huge amounts of data. Higher education institutions are also heavy participants, since they often have large library efforts already and the requisite expertise regarding what to save.
Technical issues around storage and preservation of such large volumes of data are hardly trivial. Questions about long-term storage of huge amounts of irreplaceable information can quickly devolve into highly technical questions about repository design, tiered storage, data management and digital asset management, open storage, data curation, immersive technology, repositories and federated archives, and Web 2.0 services.
University librarians and other experts come into the picture in helping to address issues around what to keep, Pasquinelli said. How large the audience is for a particular item is one criterion, but there are many others. "[Experts] have to make decisions about what content is really valuable and has a big audience, along with what to keep [that] is not going to be [used] all that much. Not all the data and not all the collections are equal in interest," Pasquinelli said.
Librarians work with architecture experts to decide what is most valuable, and what users will want, then tie that into the design of the storage architecture. Disks, for example, might be used for information that will be accessed most often. Tapes, which are more economical and more power-friendly, since they needn't constantly spin, might store data that will be accessed less often. Disaster recovery also enters into the picture: Software might send information to three locations, so that backup is built into the architecture.
Since storage media fade, everything also must be revamped on a planned basis, just as in a major data center. "Everything constantly has to be updated," Pasquinelli said. "The people, the media, the equipment it's running on, the applications, and the data itself: They all get old."
One conclusion of participants at the May meetings: Much remains to be done to address the many issues in this evolving field.
Linda L. Briggs is a freelance writer based in San Diego, Calif.
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