Weekly readings - 19 January 2007

Microsoft Unveils Wave of New Products and Services at CES. Press release. Jan. 7, 2007.

Microsoft has unveiled their Home Server, which provides a central place to help store, protect and access all the digital content in the home. This is a new software product intended for homes with multiple PCs to connect their computers, digital devices and printers to help store, protect and share their digital collections. This is to help consumers deal with their rapidly increasing digital content (e.g. 273 billion digital images were captured worldwide in 2006). In the US over 40 million homes have more than one PC and over 30% have an MP3 player. The Home Server automatically backs up home PCs and is a central location for storing a photographs, music, videos and documents.

Architectural Considerations for Archive and Compliance Solutions. White paper. Computerworld. January 8, 2007.

Within the IT industry there is no agreement on a definition of ‘archive’. For some it means moving inactive data; for others it is permanent, managed storage. Long-Term Data Retention is becoming more important. Data retention periods have increased, in some cases to 100 years or more. U.S. regulations require all medical records to be retained for 30 years after a person’s death. And with today’s life expectancy rates, this could mean retaining records for well over 100 years. As the amount of data grows, the data management will become even more complex and costly to maintain. Data integrity assurance ensures that data is identically maintained throughout all operations, including transfer, storage, and retrieval. Checksum algorithms are a common form of data integrity assurance.

Maintaining data in a usable format is critical because we don’t know what applications will be used long term. Saving data in its native format may be a way to enable organizations to access it in the future.

E-Journal Archiving Metes and Bounds: A Survey of the Landscape. Anne R. Kenney, et al. CLIR pub 138. September, 2006.

This report summarizes a review of 12 e-journal archiving programs from the perspective of concerns expressed by directors of academic libraries in North America. It uses a methodology comparable to the art of surveying land by “metes and bounds” in the era before precise measures and calibrated instruments were available. It argues that current license arrangements are inadequate to protect a library’s long-term interest in electronic journals, that individual libraries cannot address the preservation needs of e-journals on their own, that much scholarly e-literature is not covered by archiving arrangements, and that while e-journal archiving programs are becoming available, no comprehensive solution has emerged and large parts of e-literature go unprotected.

SDSC Releases Open-Source iRODS Data Management System. January 10, 2007.

Large data collections are bringing dramatic results. Large collections can exceed 100 TB in size, and are difficult to manage. The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has released the latest open-source version of iRODS, the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, which represents a new approach to distributed data management. iRODS supports data grids, digital libraries, and persistent archives. Managing data consists of a large number of complex inter-related tasks.