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...view?

Funny Hugh should ask. While I don't work in the area of digital preservation, the organization I work for does: "Long-term retention of digital research materials" is one of RLG's core programmatic activities. And, given Hugh's inquiry, I think it's well worth spending a column discussing some issues and sharing where to go for more information. The material here (other than pointers to RLG documents) represents my own interpretation of what I've read and experienced; don't blame RLG for my errors!

DEFINING THE TERMS

There's a lot more to the digital record than research materials, but the issues for born-digital research material are generally the same as for other content. If the library, archive, museum, and research communities can resolve some or all of those issues, the solutions will be useful for others as well--although they may be more difficult to implement for commercial and personal content.

What does long term mean? For librarians and archivists, archival retention means...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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