Weekly Readings - 7 April 2006

Institutional Repositories: An Opportunity for CIO Campus Impact. Marilu Goodyear and Richard Fyffe. EDUCAUSE Review. March/April 2006.
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0626.asp?bhcp=1

“The importance of the research enterprise calls for paying significant attention to the stewardship and preservation of the institution’s digital assets, particularly those that are unique to the campus.” Often, current systems do not provide short-term access, nor long-term access, well. The collections are mostly uncurated collections of important and trivial information, current and superseded work, hosted on platforms with no checks for data integrity, minimal metadata for provenance, little encoding for version or access control, and no support for format migration. In reality, they have none of the structures and functions provide assurance of ongoing accessibility and usability for digital files. Repositories can be more than tools for sharing information, they can be tools for preservation. Currently there is no repository that can do all the digital preservation functions. They mostly provide a way to select, describe, and depository materials in a central location. This can encourage understanding and discussion of the conditions that make digital preservation possible. Involving the IT organization can provide a number of benefits:
 It can serve faculty in all disciplines
 It can demonstrate the value of research contributions to the institution
 The CIO can stay ahead of issues of academic research and digital preservation
Maintaining digital assets should be a matter of concern to the CIO


Surveying the E-Journal Preservation Landscape. Anne R. Kenney. March 23, 2006.
www.clir.org/pubs/archives/ejournal.htm

"Digital preservation represents one of the grand challenges facing higher education." Preserving electronic publications has become a critical matter as e-publication increases and user communities depend more on electronic publications. A number of initiatives acknowledge preservation responsibility for e-journal archiving.


A faster, denser hard drive debuts. Jon L. Jacobi . Computerworld. March 31, 2006.
http://www.computerworld.com/newsletter/0,4902,110111,00.html?nlid=ST

The first hard drives to use the perpendicular storage technology show that the drives hold more, but are faster. They are projecting that 2TB disks will be available before long. The cost will be about the same per gigabyte and existing disks.


Sony's Universal Media Disc facing last rites. Thomas K. Arnold. Computerworld. March 30, 2006.
http://www.computerworld.com/newsletter/0,4902,110083,00.html?nlid=ST

After only one year, Sony's Universal Media Disc is being phased out. Disappointing sales and lack of support have caused retailers to discontinue selling the disc. One executive compared this failure to blu-ray.


Holographic disk hits 300GB mark. Chris Mellor. Computerworld. March 28, 2006.
http://www.computerworld.com/newsletter/0,4902,109994,00.html
InPase Technology Inc. has announced that it has created a holographic disc which can store more data than any other disc. It plans to release the 300GB later this year. A holographic disc stores data inside the disc, not just on the surface. It is also faster for retrieving data.