Got Data? A Guide To Data Preservation In The Information Age

摘要

Imagine the modern world without digital data-anything that can be stored in digital form and accessed electronically, including numbers, text, images, video, audio, software, and sensor signals. We listen to digital music on our iPods, watch streaming video on YouTube, record events with digital cameras, and text our colleagues, family, and friends on BlackBerrys and cell phones. Many of our medical records, financial data, and other personal and professional information are in digital form. Moreover, the Internet and its digital products have become our library, shopping mall, classroom, and boardroom. It is difficult to imagine the information age without unlimited access to and availability of the digital data that is its foundation. Digital data is also fragile. For most of us, an underlying assumption is that our data will be accessible whenever we want it. We also regularly confront the fallacy of this assumption; most of us (or our friends) have had hard drives crash with the loss of valuable information or seen storage media become obsolete, rendering information unavailable (think floppy disks). Loss, damage, and unavailability of important digital business, historical, and official documents regularly make the news, further highlighting our dependence on electronic information. As a supporting foundation for our efforts in the information age, digital data in the cyberworld is analogous to infrastructure in the physical world, including roads, bridges, water, and electricity. And like physical infrastructure, we want our data infrastructure to be stable, predictable, cost-effective, and sustainable. Creating systems with these and other critical characteristics in the cyberworld of information technology involves tackling a spectrum of technical, policy, economic, research, education, and social issues.