Common Solutions Group Meeting (CSG) and Long Term Storgage

I just attended my first Common Solutions Group (CSG) meeting and found it to be very informative and interactive. You can find a bit more about the meeting and organization at http://www.stonesoup.org And, I met Jack from UW Madison who shoots skeet!!

I'll take the first topic on the agenda which was right on target with what we're looking at in the realm of repositories and how to aggregate data in the years to come. The title was: Shared Media & Data Repositories, and What's New in Scholarly Systems

The first presentation was by Jim DeRoest from The University of Washington. They have been working on storage of video data and it has morphed into adding work flow for images and other media. Their repository called DigitalWell (link to slides) is billed as an asset management system but by my definition it is much more. I have to note one of my ITLP colleages (Jim Kerkhoff) from UT Austin has been part of a fine arts repository and also presented some great information (UT Austin Slides). Both are home grown systems and are gaining traction at their respective institutions.

The question that I just can't get answered by anyone that has anything to do with development of an archive, media storage service, repository (whatever you want to call it), is: How do you plan on storing the data and who is going to pay for it long term?? I'm astonished that nobody seems to be thinking or worrying about it? It's going to cost lots of money to store this stuff over time. I can't figure out if everyone is too scared to answer or they think that storage is or will be such a commodity over time that it's not going to be an issue. I don't think that flies in the near term (5 - 7 years).

We are now seeing institutional and historical data being created in pure digital formats. What happens to the data over time and how do we assure that this data is preserved? Please remember I'm not an advocate of keeping everything. Actually I'd prefer keeping very little, but I believe there is truly data that will be lost because few are thinking about services around this long term preservation of born digital data.

Now, what if we do create a service around this archive, repository, media service...... Oh, and I have to remind you that it has to be easy to use and scalable or nobody's going to touch it. Then what's the best platform to assure we preserve it for the long haul?

DLT is currently working on questions regarding data that must be kept for the life of a student, not to mention publications that most likely will never be deleted. That's a long time in computing terms. We're working to answer the questions around best practices, platforms and how we life cycle the actual hardware and software over time (can we trust migration tools?). One must assure what's put in is what someone can get out, or a representation thereof 70+ years later? Will it be disk, tape, Content Addressable Storage (CAS) or a combination of them all?

Feedback will be great in this area, I'd like to get as many opinions as possible!