Digital Preservation
The rain seems to be constant these days and from what I gather, we are going to see more rain for the rest of the week. I cancelled a golf outing yesterday evening with friends so I could watch the Memorial tournament played in Ohio last week. Something told me that we are in for an exciting finish with Tiger going for his 73rd win to tie Jack Nicklaus for the second place in all time PGA wins. And it was exciting indeed. Tiger’s enormously risky shot on the 16th set the stage for the rest of the tournament and a great finish.
I spent a couple of days last week in beautiful Middlebury, VT, attending a gathering of Oberlin 17, the Northeast schools who belong to the Oberlin group. The very first exercise was a chance to talk about what we have done in the past year, what questions we have for the others and what are the opportunities for collaboration. There were considerable overlap in that most of us are doing very similar things, have questions regarding very similar issues and would like to talk about collaborations in areas of considerable interest to many. Except, when we sat down to talk about the specifics of collaboration, I didn’t get the feeling that we are going to see much in the way of progress. Call me a skeptic! The reason is, as one of the participants pointed out, some of the calls for collaborations are weakened by the “these problems are local” issue. For eg. a call for shared instructional technology resources is a great concept on which we should be able to collaborate. But, the faculty who are used to a support model and service expectations from our own staff are anxious about this model where the support person is elsewhere. There are also a lot other logistical constraints such as who is managing this person, how are we dividing up the time that this person is expected to allocate to each campus, so on and so forth.
There was a question about digital storage management for which I answered based on what we are doing, but then I was reminded that the issue of digital preservation is a much bigger one. And it is indeed a huge issue!