Team Digital Preservation is back!

September 23rd, 02009 by Heather Louise Mae Bowden

Now with their second installment: Team Digital Preservation and the Aeroplane Disaster. In this episode, Team Digital Preservation takes on the problem of obsolete software by migrating important digital files to the most current formats.

This goes hand-in-hand with Kevin Kelly’s concept of movage. We’ve got to keep our digital information moving; from storage medium to storage medium, from software platform to software platform, and from file format to file format.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 02009 at 9:25 am and is filed under "Long Shorts", Digital Dark Age.

  • http://tantek.com/ Tantek Çelik

    Perhaps Team Digital Preservation could help with the preservation of longnow.org.

    Format migration was last decade’s news and preservation focus.

    Increasingly the data and documents we create and serve today are on the web, and depend on hyperlinks continuing to work, thus raising the importance of maintaining permalinks, and self-hosting your content.

    For starters, consider putting all of these on longnow.org

    1. permalinks for Longnow seminars – so others can cite and refer to them (e.g. in a Wikipedia article). See citability.org for more.

    2. self-host your own content, and use other sites only for “backup” or secondary syndication purposes
    * calendars on longnow.org rather than on Google calendar
    * mp3s on longnow.org instead of llnwd.net
    * transcripts on longnow.org instead of fora.tv
    * video clips on longnow.org instead of YouTube (like the above, nevermind the expectedly ephemerance of the FLV format)
    * … etc.

    Regarding “got to keep our digital information moving”, most people do not have the time or other resources to pay for this “movage tax”.

    At least start with the most long-lived / portable / open standard formats, and eschew short-term / single-device / proprietary formats rather than burdening a future generation with even more movage tax due to poor/expedient decisions.

    I’ve written more regarding open data formats and longevity on my blog here:

    http://tantek.com/log/2006/06.html#d17t2231

  • http://www.longnow.org Alexander Rose

    These are excellent points. I am not sure I agree that the data preservation and format migration are a done deal by any means, but I get your point about new data and the web.

    The new site launching soon will indeed have permalinks to Seminar pages.

    We do self host all the content you mention in your post as well as store archival formats, its just that we use distribution partners to help us do that as we cant afford to serve it all. In other words we work with partners who already pay the movage tax so distributing our content is a marginal cost in the grand scheme.

  • http://tantek.com/ Tantek Çelik

    Alexander,

    Good to hear that you will be launching a new site with Seminar permalinks and that you are self hosting the content, and I certainly understand the usage of distribution partners to better afford serving it all.

    Consider using longnow.org links though for ALL your content references, and then redirecting those requests (either via 302 temporary redirect on your web server(s), or if that’s too much load, via DNS and subdomains, e.g. mp3.longnow.org) to your distribution partners, so that you have the freedom to change distribution partners as needed, and people can continue to share longnow.org links for all Long Now content, without having to worry about the longevity of links to partner sites.

    Tantek

  • Pingback: — Informal Learning Blog

Blog of the Long Now

Ideas about Long-term Thinking.

     

Categories

Archives

Meta

«
»
Some Rights Reserved (CC)

The Long Now Foundation - Fostering Long-term Responsibility - est. 01996.