Bodley’s Librarian at the University of Oxford Writes in The Economist: “We Must Fight to Preserve Digital Information”

From an Op/Ed in The Economist by Richard Ovenden (Bodley’s Librarian at the University of Oxford and President of the Digital Preservation Coalition):

The growth of digital records has made preservation ever more important.

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At Oxford’s libraries we spend around 2-3% of our annual budget on digital preservation, twice as much as in the past, and we are reviewing whether this is enough.

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But for now it is librarians and archivists, the custodians of the past, that are the advance-guards of the future. They have worked with open approaches to software development, data practices and scholarly communication for years. These communities, networks and processes are a vital part of the solution. That way we can hope to avoid losing our wealth of electronic data and our collective social memory, and avert what Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the internet, fears might otherwise become a “digital Dark Age”.

Read the Complete Op/Ed (approx. 1080 words)

Filed under: Data Files, Digital Preservation, Libraries, News, Preservation