I have not yet chimed in on this list, though I have a lot of half-baked
ideas I've been wanting to put forward, but this message is something I'm
directly involved in, and thus can vouch for.
Yes, I think that the standards mentioned in the article by Roy will be
very useful in helping preserve (as well as share) information. Any good
standard helps by employing a format with is *more* resistant to
obsolescence and thus longer lived, but of course even these need updating
sometimes major revisions and sometimes replacement. The idea though is
that they very much help with the entire process of preserving information
by providing just a little more shelf-life between migrations to new
formats (and thus enormously reducing cost in terms of number of migrations
per decade, and since many institutions use a standard you can get an
economy of scale), they also help the actual process of migrating (again
common mappings, variety of tools available, etc.).
I'm involved in two organizations which work with standards. Here at the
Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive we use the EAD to describe art and
film collections (http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/search), we use XML to
describe documents and filmnotes, and the Dublin Core to "bring it all
together". We are participating for instance in one project to use the EAD
standard to create a California state-wide virtual archive including
collections information from archives, libraries and museums as part of the
Online Archive of California (http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/moac/). My
other organization, the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu/),
participates in projects in the museum community to develop standards as
well, and to partially answer the "meta-question" the process is working in
the museum/archive/library communities - some of these standards are
discipline specific but the *idea* can apply to any field; others are by
their nature very appropriate to the notion of preserving information,
since they are being developed by institutions in the business of
preserving information with that in mind.
Of course there are controversies and multiple simultaneous emerging
standards; sometimes effort is extended to make sure they do not overlap
and duplicate - while sometimes the best comparison is made by actually
implementing competing standards. In any case, these communities agree that
in general, the idea of standards in this realm are very important for the
two main goals of sharing and preserving information.
Richard Rinehart | Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive
Systems Manager & Education | University of California
Technology Specialist | 2625 Durant, Berkeley, CA 94720-2250
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
& President-Elect, Museum Computer Network, http://www.mcn.edu/