Digital Preservation

There is a good summary of the issues relating to the preservation of digital information in today's Inside Higher Education. As the article points out, many individuals and institutions are racing against the clock to preserve digital data and

to tackle a whole host of problems that so far have no satisfactory solution. They range from hardware complexities, such as constructing storage devices that continuously monitor and repair data while remaining easily scalable; redundancy measures, such as distributing and duplicating data across storage devices and even across the country; universal standards, such as formats that could conceivably remain readable in the distant future; and interfaces, such as open software protocols that manage digital holdings and make them accessible to the public.

I guess the good news is that this issue is now on libraries' radar screens; the bad news is that there is no easy fix.