2007/05/18: Barksdale & Berman on NDIIPP
I'm a few days late reporting on this opinion piece in the Washington Post by Fran Berman and Jim Barksdale (I was @ IUG all week, all apologies) .Barksdale, as you may recall, used to be CEO of Netscape. Berman is the director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (full disclosure: one of my FPOW). Both are heavily involved in NDIIPP. Barksdale is on the advisory board. SDSC is a major player in digital preservation.
They write eloquently about the need for funding digital preservation projects. They use the familiar stories about heroic recovery of Census and NASA data. The article is notable because it's being published in the regular news. I say bravo. In the long term, increasing awareness of the problem will assist in generating necessary funds.
I don't harbor any illusions that Congress is going to return the millions they recinded from the NDIIPP. I do think that having the issues in the general press will help us in the academic repository realm in our communicating with research faculty. In my experience, many faculty members don't think much about the long term preservation of their data and scholarship. The Washington Post is another avenue for faculty to get the message.
In marketing they say that a person needs to see a message seven or more times in several different ways before it sinks into consciousness. So, yay. It's great that the issue made it into mainstream media in
the United States. Britain has already had some success in that area.
See also:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,661093,00.html
http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,,916073,00.html
Labels: funding, media, NDIIPP
posted by Laura @ 11:08 AM
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