Good to know: Preserving data

Posted by Lynn Ramey on Wednesday, February 15, 2012 in Research Tools.

One of my recurring concerns ( I try to ignore it, but it keeps coming back!) has to do with the difference in knowledge base between creators and users of digital “stuff”. By that I mean, the people who create the devices/contexts/interfaces we use, make up only a very small, select few. The users, however, are the “masses,” whose knowledge base, as it pertains to digital “stuff ,” is significantly smaller than that of the creators. It’s ironic, too, seeing that we (as young scholars) work to become the select few in our specific fields of work. However, having read chapter 4 of “Planned Obsolescence” I feel as if I’m a little more “in the know” in terms of the history of the World Wide Web (why have I never heard about Tim Berners-Lee?!), and the process of presenting, storing, accessing, and preserving data there.
This knowledge, though it has little bearing on our understanding of how things work, helps us to separate ourselves from the “masses” just a little bit. As scholars who intend to use the World Wide Web to present, preserve, and access our work, it’s good to know about the various tools/initiatives/limitations/possibilities that will affect the choices we make on how we use the web.