Future-safe archives

Monday, March 05, 2007 by Dave Winer.

The discussion about future-safing content continues. 

I had lunch on Sunday with Jeff Ubois, he's been working on archiving for many years. He sent me an article by Alfred de Grazia, explaining the problem for academics. When a scholar dies, he or she leaves behind a life of work, papers, unfinished manuscripts, notebooks, pictures, recordings, and nowadays computers, disks and websites. Their family and university generally don't know what to do with them, often the problem is given to the libraries.  

Our thought is to try to anticipate the problem, while the scholar is alive, and now that our work is largely electronic, to have it future-safe at all times, leave no work for the librarian, let the families and colleagues deal with the death of a relative and colleague at a personal level, and not as a professional problem.