As the nation commits more and more of its information and data resources to digital form, the assurance that vital records are stored and information is preserved for future generations is essential. The NSF Workshop on Data Archival and Information Preservation addressing these issues is organized by Christine Borgman, UCLA; Su-Shing Chen, University of Missouri-Columbia (Co-Chair), Hector Garcia-Molina, Stanford University; Ken Thibodeau, NARA and Gio Wiederhold, Stanford University (Co-Chair) and is held on March 26-27, 1999 in Washington DC. The goal of this workshop is to provide research directions concerning with various aspects of data archival and information preservation. The objective is to converge different aspects to a visionary report for archivists, system developers, organizations, and technologists. Topics to be discussed include: Information Preservation and its Requirements; Information Media and Storage Media; System and Technology; Workflow, Information Preservation and Data Archiving Processes; and Policy and Usability. The material prepared for the workshop, and, at the conclusion, the final report of the workshop will be submitted to NSF and disseminated widely, including at the workshop Web sites at http://www-db.stanford.edu/LIC/preservation.html and and http://cecssrv1.cecs.missouri.edu/NSFWorkshop.html .
