1. Home
  2. "our cultural commonwealth"
  3. "our cultural commonwealth"
  4. Ephemerality

0.13 Ephemerality

<< Chapter < Page
  "our cultural commonwealth"   Page 1 / 1
Chapter >> Page >

The Commission has identified six key challenges that must be engaged if we intend to build a robustcyberinfrastructure:

  • The ephemeral nature of digital data
  • The nature of humanities and social science data
  • Copyright laws
  • The conservative culture of scholarship
  • Uncertainty about the future mechanisms, forms, and economics of scholarly publishing and scholarly communication moregenerally
  • Insufficient resources, will, and leadership to build cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences

Ephemerality

The study of human cultures and creativity is founded on access to the records of the past. Preserving andensuring the authenticity of the artifacts and records of the past is one of the most valued functions of libraries, archives, andmuseums—and yet we have only begun to learn how to do these things with the political, economic, social, and cultural record of ourincreasingly digital civilization.

For an overview of some of the preservation issues and literature, see Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig,“Preserving Digital History,” in Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) (External Link) .
Digital data are notoriously fragile, short-lived, and easy to manipulatewithout leaving obvious evidence of fraud. Therefore, such content is best preserved in trustworthy repositories, without which therewill be critical breaks in the chain of evidence. Although sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace
YouTube (External Link) ; Flickr (External Link) ; Facebook (External Link) ; MySpace (External Link) .
have become popular for hosting digital collections, they are not repositories that ensurelong-term access to the content. The rapid turnover in digital hardware and software often leaves digital data marooned on mediaor in formats that can no longer be accessed and that are highly susceptible to deterioration and loss. Preservation requires thescrupulous management of data from the moment it enters a repository through the steps of validation, storage, migration, anddelivery to parties that have been authenticated and authorized to receive it. These are complex technical procedures dependent onstandards and protocols that work quickly and reliably. Preservation was once an obscure backroom operation of interestchiefly to conservators and archivists: it is now widely recognized as one of the most important elements of a functional and enduringcyberinfrastructure.
<< Chapter < Page Page > Chapter >>

Read also:

Get Jobilize Job Search Mobile App in your pocket Now!

Get it on Google Play Download on the App Store Now




Source:  OpenStax, "our cultural commonwealth" the report of the american council of learned societies commission on cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. OpenStax CNX. Dec 15, 2006 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10391/1.2
Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google Inc.

Notification Switch

Would you like to follow the '"our cultural commonwealth" the report of the american council of learned societies commission on cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences' conversation and receive update notifications?

Ask