The CODATA Mission: Preserving Scientific Data for the Future.Jeanne Kramer-Smyth. Spellbound Blog. February, 2013.
This is a post (and a link to the slides) about a session that was part of The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation conference.
The aim was to describe the initiatives of the Data at Risk Task Group
(DARTG), which is part of the International Council for Science
Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA).
The goal
is to preserve scientific data that is in danger of loss because they
are not in modern electronic formats, or have particularly short
shelf-life. The task group is seeking out sources of such data worldwide
since many are irreplaceable for research into the long-term trends
that occur in the natural world. One speaker talked about two forms of
knowledge that we are concerned with here: the memory of the world and
the forgettery of the world. Only the digital, or recently digitized,
data can be recalled readily and made immediately accessible for
research in the digital formats that research needs. The “forgettery of
the world” is the analog records, ones that have been set aside for
whatever reason, or put away for a long time and have become almost
forgotten. It the analog data which are considered to be “at risk” and
which are the task group’s immediate concern. Some of the early digital
data are insufficiently described, or the format is out of date and
unreadable, or the records cannot be located at all easily.
How
can such “data at risk” be recovered and made useable? An inventory
website has been set up where one can report data-at-risk. The
overarching goal is to build a research knowledge base that offers a
complimentary combination of past, present and future records. Some data
mentioned: Oceanographic; climate; satellite; and other scientific data
sets; born digital maps. With digital preservation initiatives there is
a lot of rhetoric, but not so much action. There have been many
consultations, studies, reports and initiatives but not very much has
translated into action.
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