NIST to map road to digital record preservation

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is hosting the first part of a really important series of meetings at its Maryland headquarters next week as a first step toward developing a national road map to digital record preservation.

The meetings will bring together government, industry and academic experts on the subject to answer just one question: Can digital preservation repositories be effectively accessible and interoperable across varieties of systems and devices throughout the life cycle of their content?

The answer to that question goes to the core of just about all of the Web 2.0 and subsequent generations of digital technologies. Cloud computing, for example, will not be possible without it.

The second part of the NIST meetings will be held in Dresden, Germany, in April where the same question will be put to the international community, the goal there being to extend this digital preservation road map into the arena of global standards-making.

It looks like March and April will be a grand old time for all of you digital preservation nerds out there. The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access (they really need a sexier title!) will be meeting April 1 in Washington to talk about digital preservation “sustainable practices.”

Have fun, you crazy kids!