Retaining Information for 100 Years (Spring 2009)

Many organizations now have a requirement to preserve large volumes of digital content indefinitely into the future, and to maintain access for reasons such as medical treatment decisions, retention of intellectual property, and appreciation of cultural and scientific history. Frequent news stories cover organizations' failures to be able to do this, such as the near loss of original video/data of the first moon landing, eventually recovered from a set of 14-inch tape reels found in a dusty Australian basement. This session will focus on the most important questions in long-term digital preservation and will demonstrate why it is still so difficult. We will propose how the storage industry can help its customers preserve and use their digital content over the lifetimes that they expect from past experience with physical and analog assets, lifetimes that can greatly exceed those of any single digital storage device or storage technology.

Learning Objectives

Understand the threats to long-term digital content and how these threats differ from those associated with analog content and short-term digital assets.
Identify current Best Practices, developed within SNIA and other organizations, for addressing these threats.
List some of the unsolved problems in long-term digital preservation and identify opportunities for further progress.