http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/01/10/73755_HNcdlifespan_1.html

January 10, 2006 | IDG News via InfoWorld.com

IBM expert warns of short life span for burned CDs
Burned CDs have a life span of between two to five years, storage expert says


By John Blau, IDG News Service

Opinions vary on how to preserve data on digital storage media, such as
optical CDs and DVDs. Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at
IBM Deutschland, has his own view: If you want to avoid having to burn
new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures,
videos and songs for a lifetime.

"Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life
span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD,"
Gerecke said in an interview this week. "There are a few things you can
do to extend the life of a burned CD, like keeping the disc in a cool,
dark space, but not a whole lot more." [...]

The Communication ‘i2010: digital libraries’ and the accompanying staff working paper have explored the consequences of the Internet environment for the accessibility and usability of Europe’s intellectual record. The questions below address a set of issues identified in the Communication and the staff working paper, which require further consideration and discussion. The questions have to be read in conjunction with the relevant parts of the main documents.

[...]

Digitisation and online accessibility

1) What additional measures could be taken at national and European level to encourage digitisation and online accessibility of material in all European languages?


2) What measures could be taken to promote private investments and new business-models such as public-private partnerships for digitising and making historical collections accessible?


3) What measures of a legislative, technical, organisational or other nature, could facilitate the digitisation and subsequent accessibility of copyrighted material, while respecting the legitimate interests of authors?


4) Is the issue of orphan material economically important and relevant in practice? If yes, what technical, organisational and legal mechanisms could be used to facilitate wider use of this material?


5) How could public domain material and other material available for general use (voluntary sharing) be made more transparent and widely known in order to facilitate its online availability for subsequent use?


Preservation of digital content


6) What priority measures – in particular of an organisational and legal nature-– should be taken at national and European level to optimise the preservation of digital content with the limited resources available?


7) Is there a risk that national legal deposit schemes lead to a multiplication of requirements on internationally active companies? Would European legislation help avoiding this?


8) How could research contribute to progress on the preservation front? Which axes of work should be addressed in priority by the forthcoming Specific Research Programmes as part of the 7th Framework Programme?


All interested individuals and organisations - from the private and from the public sector - are encouraged to provide their views on some or all of these questions. Replies and comments should be sent to the following address before 20 January 2006:
European Commission
Attn. Mr. Hernández-Ros,
Head of Unit DG INFSO E4, Information Market
Bâtiment EUROFORUM, Office 1174
Rue Alcide de Gasperi
L-2920 Luxembourg
E-mail address: ec-digital-libraries@cec.eu.int

Organisations and persons contributing to the consultation will get an acknowledgment of receipt of their contribution.

Here are my opinions to the questions above.

1) Let me say first that I support "Open Access" (OA) and not "Toll Access" to cultural heritage items. All digitized materials should be free of cost and without permission barriers available in the internet.

States and funding agencies should pay that all citizens with internet access can enjoy for free the treasure of knowledge. Public funded scholarly research results should be OA.

Libraries should not digitize historical items without cooperation with the potential users and especially the scholars in the relevant thematic field.

There should be more support for and more cooperation with grassroot digitization made by NGO projects like Project Gutenberg or Wikisource (sister project of Wikipedia).

http://wikisource.org

See for a recent initiative of distributed scanning
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/distscan/

National and other libraries should cooperative with initiatives like the Open Content Alliance and donate scanned Public Domain books to them.

3) We need a copyright legislation which is more friendly to the legitimate interest of the public and which is really supporting the Public Domain as a main source of creativity.

The legitimate interests of authors are not the interests of copyright holder who will make money by monopolizing knowlegde.

We need a more flexible "fair use" legislation which would e.g. allow to make orphan works accessible on non-commercial websites.

4) The importance of orphan material is highly underestimated. In libraries and archives is a mass of unpublished material (manuscripts, photographs ...) one does'nt know the rights holder. While there is in the USA a debate on orphan works there is no such discussion in the EU as far as I know.

Because there is no efficient way for copyright clearing of orphan works they cannot used in an appropriate manner for enriching knowledge and research.

5) There are some ways to make digitized material more widely known.

Library should have the duty (and the money) to cataloge digitized items worldwide in a cooperative manner according to international standards like Dublin Core or the Open Archives Initiative (OAI).

There should be freely accessible meta-data from each digitized single book or other items (including table of contents).

There should be more cooperation with NGO initiatives (see above ad 1) who can e.g. contribute meta-data.

There should be more support for free full text search engines and OAI harvester beside of the large commercial search engines.

7) I do not see such a risk. A company which is a global player can deposit in any national library worldwide without any disprofit. No private company can ensure long-term preservation which is a legitimate public office. Maybe it would be a good idea to invent "knowledge taxes" for profit making companies as a compensation for the public costs for making the knowledge available e.g. in libraries and for ensuring long-term preservation.

[Feel free to redistribute this announcement to other forums where
on-topic, such as scanning, graphics, books and publishing, library
and archives, etc. Thanks.]

Everyone,

Several people privately expressed interest in the "Distributed
Scanners" (DistScan) idea I recently outlined to the Book People
forum. So, I've taken the next step and created a Yahoo discussion
group to further explore this idea -- to see if it has any legs. You
are invited to join -- refer to the info at the end of this message.)

To summarize the idea: Is there interest and need for a
volunteer-driven, large-scale distributed scanning project of public
domain books and other documents modeled after (where applicable)
Distributed Proofreaders?

The full group description, and the current expanded summary of the
idea (which will undoubtedly change and improve over time as we better
understand the various issues) is given at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/distscan/

To be clear, this group does not actually launch the project, but
rather serves only to bring together sharp, like-minded people to
explore the idea -- to see if there is a "working formula" that makes
sense, and if we can assemble a core group of people with the needed
skill sets and interest to be able to successfully launch the project.

The goal, of course, is to accelerate the high-quality scanning of
public domain texts. It is not intended to be competitive with other
projects to scan the public domain, such as those managed by the
Internet Archive (e.g. OCA), but rather to augment and possibly even
work in cooperative fashion with those projects (including
Distributed Proofreaders.)

Please read carefully the group description at the above URL. If you
wish to comment on this message, I encourage you to join the group and
post your comment there. Or, email it to me in private and I may
post it to the group (with your identity removed unless requested
otherwise).

Anyone interested in scanning the public domain (whether a private
individual or representing an institution) is invited to participate.
We definitely need people with expertise in a very wide range of
areas. Since DistScan will likely have many components, you are
probably expert in one of them! Do join and contribute to the
discussion.

Thanks!

Jon Noring


(p.s., there are three ways to subscribe to the DistScan group:

1) Use your YahooID and click on the "Join This Group!" button at the
above URL.

2) Send a blank email to: distscan-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

(No need to get a YahooID to subscribe this way.)

3) Ask me to subscribe you with the email address you want to use. No
need to get a YahooID to subscribe this way.)

Building a Digital Archive: A Dutch Experience
http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=20865#article2

Authors: Peter Horsman - Archives School, Amsterdam (p.j.horsman@archiefschool.nl), Klaartje Pompe - Rotterdam (k.pompe@gar.rotterdam.nl)

Exzerpts:

In January 2004, the municipal archives of the Dutch harbour city of Rotterdam started an ambitious project to construct a solution for the long term preservation of its digital materials. Project planners asked the Netherlands Archives School for support, and a cooperative effort between the two organizations ensued. The Archives School brings both knowledge and training skills to the project, as well as research expertise. In the School’s strategy, teaching, research, and practical applications are closely connected.

The municipal archives of Rotterdam is not a small organization. It has a staff of over 100 and holdings of 17 linear kilometers of records, hundreds of thousands of photographs, maps, drawings, prints, and books. Like most Dutch archives, it endorses the Total Archives concept, aiming to document the local society and serving as a primary source of the town’s rich history, dating back to the Middle Ages. Today, Rotterdam is a modern city, with a population of around 700,000 and a port that boasts to be the world’s largest. Increasingly the town administration carries out its business electronically, and consequently, records are created in digital form. The archives anticipates ingesting electronic records in the near future; most of the photographs, television and sound recordings are currently delivered in digital format. Furthermore, like many cultural heritage institutions, the archives undertakes programs to digitize original analog materials in order to improve access and use of its holdings. All of these types of digital materials need to be preserved as valuable cultural assets.

Project Goals

The initial goal was to develop a low-cost digital repository (e-depot), based on state-of-the art theory, standards, and best practices. The underlying idea was that if it is impossible to build a digital repository for a reasonable cost then keeping digital materials would be an impossible task for any Dutch archive. [...]

How to Proceed?

Whatever decision about DSpace is taken, the work will go on. Next steps include a rigorous system design. Based on design decisions, software options will be evaluated. The archive will need to decide the extent to which to continue with open source software. The original choice for DSpace and other open source software was a pragmatic one. DSpace was available and proved to be a good tool for acquiring knowledge and experience. A fundamental discussion about open source software has not, as of yet, been undertaken.

Working with open source is not necessarily less costly than using commercial software. It requires working with communities, and there are problems with an archival institution entering into a community mainly consisting of libraries. For open source to work, it is absolutely necessary to establish an archival community to cooperate and to share experiences and costs.

The following is from
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_12_11_fosblogarchive.html#113465430061996426

Jim Giles, Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, Nature, December 14, 2005. (Thanks to Declan Butler.) Excerpt:

Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries....[A]n expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples [of Wikipedia errors] are the exception rather than the rule. The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three. Considering how Wikipedia articles are written, that result might seem surprising. A solar physicist could, for example, work on the entry on the Sun, but would have the same status as a contributor without an academic background. Disputes about content are usually resolved by discussion among users. But Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and president of the encyclopaedia's parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation of St Petersburg, Florida, says the finding shows the potential of Wikipedia. "I'm pleased," he says. "Our goal is to get to Britannica quality, or better."...In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team. Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively....[T]o improve Wikipedia, Wales is not so much interested in checking articles with experts as getting them to write the articles in the first place. As well as comparing the two encyclopaedias, Nature surveyed more than 1,000 Nature authors and found that although more than 70% had heard of Wikipedia and 17% of those consulted it on a weekly basis, less than 10% help to update it.

In its accompanying editorial Nature endorses Wikipedia and asks scientists to help it out:

So can Wikipedia move up a gear and match the quality of rival reference works? Imagine the result if it did: a comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date reference work that can be accessed free from Manhattan to rural Mongolia. To achieve this, Wikipedia's administrators will have to tackle everything from future funding problems — the site is maintained by public donations — to doubts about whether enough new contributors can be found to increase the quality of the mushrooming number of entries. That latter point is critical, and here scientists can make a difference. Judging by a survey of Nature authors, conducted in parallel with the accuracy investigation, only a small percentage of scientists currently contribute to Wikipedia. Yet when they do, they can make a significant difference. Wikipedia's non-expert contributors are, by and large, dedicated to getting things right on the site. But scientists can bring a critical eye to entries on subjects they study, often highlighting errors and misunderstandings that others have unintentionally introduced. They can also start entries on topics that other users may not want to tackle. It is no surprise, for example, that the entry on 'spin density wave' was originated by a physicist....Nature would like to encourage its readers to help. The idea is not to seek a replacement for established sources such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but to push forward the grand experiment that is Wikipedia, and to see how much it can improve. Select a topic close to your work and look it up on Wikipedia. If the entry contains errors or important omissions, dive in and help fix them. It need not take too long. And imagine the pay-off: you could be one of the people who helped turn an apparently stupid idea into a free, high-quality global resource.

PS: I made a similar point in SOAN for July 2005:

If you're an expert on a certain topic, then make sure that Wikipedia includes the fruits of your expertise....You may not have a high opinion of Wikipedia, but there are two reasons not to let that stop you. First, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If experts add or enhance articles to reflect their expertise, then Wikipedia will deserve respect to that extent. Second, Wikipedia is an increasingly common first stop, and probably last stop, for non-academic users looking for information. If you want to be visible to non-academic users, then it's an eyeball destination that you can easily join....Don't give up your standards, but don't judge this resource from mere presumptions without firsthand knowledge.

Vol. 2, 2004, Nr. 3 as free sample at
http://www.haworthpress.com/store/sampletext/J201.pdf

The free sample of "Library & Archival Security" 2003/2
http://www.haworthpress.com/store/SampleText/J114.pdf
contains two articles on RFID.

"Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire Fribourg - This Swiss library makes available online a number of images from its Photograph Collections (Fonds photographiques fribourgeois). Search the catalogue by keyword (par mot-clé) for image fixe and combine it with a subject.

* In the Fonds Jacques Thévoz (1918-1983) are over 700 online photographs "showing with humor, finesse and perspicacity, the daily life of the poeple of Fribourg". Examples: Famille Jacques Thévoz (Véronique, Laurent et Madeleine) avec l'oncle Victor (Blanc) et son épouse, Mme Henseler et sa fille Françoise (1953), Mariage Frey-Monney: cortège nuptial, Broye, Estavayer-le-Lac (1950), Mademoiselle Savioz, and Yoki Aebischer, artiste peintre, dans son atelier, Fribourg, Bourg, rue des Epouses (1949).
* The Fonds Albert Ramstein is a collection of over 350 online portraits and photographs taken by Albert Ramstein between 1923 and 1945. Examples: M. T. H. M. Meyer, St. Albanvorst 41, Bâle (1906), Couple avec deux enfants en calèche attelée and Deux jeunes femmes.
* The Fonds Benedikt Rast consists of over 1400 online images primarily of architecture and landscape. Examples: Wünnewil, [petite fille cousant et armoire], Bösingen, [ancien grenier], and Bösingen, château de Vogelshaus, portail principal.
* There is also a postcard collection, Fonds des cartes postales fribourgeoises, arranged by subject and Localité. Examples: Fribourg, enfants réfugiés, Pensionnat de Ste-Ursule, Fribourg - Un dortoir (circau 1915) and Bellegarde (Jaun) - Hôtel de la Cascade taken by the photographer Charles Morel."

See http://www.digital-librarian.com/images.html for a version with links.

"Rules on historical archives",
adopted by the Bank's Management Committee on 7 October 2005.

http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/lex/en/dossier/selection.htm

Report
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISC-Digi-in-UK-FULL-v1-02.pdf

List of projects pp. 174 sqq.

See also http://wiki.netbib.de/coma/DigiUK