Francine Berman UCSD "Blue Ribbon Panel on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access"
The Blue Ribbon Panel on Sustainable Digital Preservation will seek to clearly and compellingly outline the problem, analyze relevant work and best practices, and provide actionable recommendations to support the development of an economically viable and effective national framework for digital preservation. The group plans to work closely with the NSF, the research, education and preservation communities, and other interested agencies and foundations (including the Library of Congress, the Mellon Foundation, the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, and others) to achieve these goals, and to maximize the impact of the panel's proceedings, produce effective and useful written materials, and deliver a compelling Final Report which focuses attention on this critical grand challenge and helps illuminate a way forward.
The broader impact of this workshop is as follows: The Workshop noted "a critical need for research and development of economic and business models that will sustain digital preservation ... New business models are needed to make digital preservation affordable to individuals, government agencies, universities, cultural institutions, and society at large."
The intellectual merit of the workshop is that the need for such infrastructure will only become more acute as our scientific knowledge and cultural record in short, the information based raw materials with which we discover, learn, and prosper, along with the environments in which we produce and consume information continue to migrate to the digital realm.
