What I find more interesting in the discussion is the preoccupation with
the preservation of texts, rather than preservation of multimedia!
(Luciana hinted at this in her note) Clearly many of the archival or
permanent documents of the present or very near future are not texts,
they are "compound documents" or multimedia objects. From my very
limited perspective it seems that recent efforts made by W3c to
establish standards have had very limited success, and recent episodes
such as the proprietary breakaways we've seen with Java or with DVD
development have suggested that market forces are driving the
technological development away from standards rather than towards them.
I believe this is where the battle is supposed to be being fought when
we think about multimedia preservation. Sustainable media is one small
part of the larger puzzle, but I think we have a much greater potential
for cultural and documentary loss with materials that are "born
multimedia" (an extension of Lyman and Besser's "born digital"
citation)....It's harder to keep those things in mind because their
enduring value to society, or to an organization, has not been
established since they are so relatively new...One of the Time and Bits
papers suggested this may be an issue that resolves itself under the
assumption that standards will eventually be adopted by technology
manufacturers, but it seems to me this won't happen until standards are
deemed profitable. What happens until that glorious day?
Another limitation of the discussion is the concentration on cultural
objects as opposed to vital records of organizations, but maybe that's
getting too far away from the current thread....
Rob Spindler, Head
Dept. of Archives and Manuscripts
Arizona State University Libraries, Box 871006 Tempe, AZ 85287