Digital Preservation symposium

Inside Higher Education reports that symposium called "A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information" was held in Washington DC on April 1, 2010, hosted by the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access . The symposium brought together a diverse group of speakers from the academic, private, and public sectors to discuss the recent Report (116 page pdf) prepared by the task force and titled "Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information". The group discussed the problems of digital preservation, especially in academia, where too little has been done to systematically preserve the massive quantities of cultural artifacts being produced daily in digital formats. In its report, the task force analyzes the problem according to four different types of information that ought to be preserved — scholarly work, research data, commercially owned cultural content (e.g., television shows, films, online publications, etc.), and collectively produced Web content (e.g., blogs, social networking sites, etc.) — and makes recommendations for each.