Saving the Present

Robin Dale, a representative from RLG, a non-profit founded by Yale, Harvard, Columbia and the New York Public Libraries, talks about the fragility of information in the digital age. Dale notes that already we have lost as many as 80 percent of the movies made during the Silent Era.

Mountain View, CA (PRWEB) September 15, 2005 -- Much of the past has been lost to modern society--rich, cultural history obliterated by the vicissitudes of wars, natural disasters, or simply through lack of proper care. The celebrated collections in The Royal Library of Alexandia were destroyed by fire. Priceless versions of The Koran were lost forever in the lootings of Iraq's National Library in Baghdad.

Already, we have lost as many as 80 percent of the movies that were made during the the Silent Era. Those early films were made on nitrate negatives and most were lost before we knew of the destructive effects of time.

Paradoxically, the computer age has not made the preservation of cultural materials any easier. The Ivar Aasen Centre of Language and Culture in Norway lost access to its electronic catalog of holdings after the death of an administrator, the only individual who knew the passwords to the system.

The fragile nature of digital media also presents special problems-a recent report estimated the longevity of CDs and DVDs at between 20 and 200 years, a small fraction of the thousands of years that printed manuscripts have survived.

Robin Dale, a program officer for RLG, a Mountain View, California organization dedicated to addressing the problems of saving and preserving digital information, says, "People assume that digital materials can be preserved forever and yet, that just isn't true. We have all experienced personal examples of digital preservation: lost or corrupt computer files, inaccessible data because the file was created in a program no longer available. In some cases, files have been stored on media for which our computers no longer have drives to read them."

According to Dale, many of RLG's initiatives focus on standardizing methods of collecting and storing materials so that these cultural resources will survive for future generations. She says, "The 1960 census was often cited as having been lost, but in reality, the information was just not accessible because we lacked the hardware and software to access the disks where the information was saved."

One of RLG's latest efforts has been to help develop "An Audit Checklist for the Certification of Digital Repositories." These repositories are the institutions that store and maintain digital collections.     A joint effort between RLG and NARA (the National Archives and Records Administration), the checklist provides criteria for evaluating digital warehouses and will be used in certifying repositories in the future.

These guidelines are enormously important for universities and other institutions who currently take precautions against natural disasters and other mishaps but don't have reliable criteria for evaluating digital repositories. The issues covered by the checklist include guidelines for detecting data corruption and loss. Certified repositories are also required to plan for natural disasters and to maintain proper climatic controls. For information about future steps and related projects, please see http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=580.

Says Dale, "The repositories are the guardians of our future, and we are trying to ensure that digital records will be preserved for generations to come."

About RLG
Founded in 1974 by The New York Public Library and Columbia, Harvard, and Yale universities, RLG provides solutions to the challenges presented by information access and management in the digital era. A not-for-profit organization, headquartered in Mountain View, California, RLG is composed of over 150 international research libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural memory institutions, ranging from the Getty Museum to Harvard University. RLG's global membership has remarkable collections for research and learning.    For more information, please see http://www.rlg.org.

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