The computer industry has successfully provided many tools for creating the digital counterparts of formerly analog assets, including photographs, music, movies, medical records and scientific databases. One of the promises of this digital world is that these virtual assets can "live forever." Unfortunately, experience shows us that digital materials, even those stored on long-lived media, are often more vulnerable to damage and corruption than analog materials.
Why is this? What can we do about it? This presentation will cover the threats to digital preservation and some of the solutions under development.
Slides:
Download slides in PDF format.
Also of Interest:
On Oct 12, 2005, Windsor Hsu of IBM Almaden spoke in EE380 on a similar topic, Fossilization™ of Electronic Records. The video is on-line--access it using the left index and select the 2005-2006 Fall schedule. A very different approach to making documents live forever was described Jun 2, 1999 by Dave Rosenthal and and Vicky Reich, Making Web Publishing Irreversible. The video for this talk is not available on-line at this time.
Recently Stanford got a grant to further some of the ideas discussed in this talk. The press release provides some details.
About the speaker:
Mary Baker is a senior research scientist at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto. Her research interests include distributed systems, networks, mobile systems and digital preservation. She has a PhD in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. Baker was a founding member of the IEEE Pervasive Computing editorial board and the NTT DoCoMo USA Labs technical advisory board. For more information see her web page.
Contact information:
Mary Baker
1501 Page Mill Road
Mail Stop 1183
Palo Alto, CA 94304
650-857-4128
650-857-7029