David Rosenthal has made preprints of two important new papers available. One is called “Economics of Long Term Digital Storage” and is available at
http://www.lockss.org/locksswp/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/unesco2012.pdf
This paper extends his earlier work on the costs of long-term digital storage; I heard a summary of the findings at the Library of Congress sponsored Storage Architectures Symposium last week, and I think it’s definitely the most sophisticated model we have to to date of these costs. I’m very hopeful that David will be able to join us for the fall CNI member meeting to present (and perhaps even update) these findings.
The second paper looks at LOCKSS in conjunction with various cloud architectures, and actually offers a great deal of insight into the value of clouds for digital preservation more generally. It includes some of the first analysis I’ve seen of Amazon’s new Glacier long-term storage option as part of a digital preservation strategy. The paper can be found here:
http://www.lockss.org/locksswp/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/LC-final-2012.pdf
Readers may also find David’s blog at http://blog.dshr.org/ helpful for more background on these two papers, and David’s work more broadly.
In the UK, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has recently made available a report titled “Curation in the Cloud” which describes a number of experimental projects that are underway in the UK to help understand how cloud technologies interact with digital preservation. The announcement and a pointer to the report proper can be found at
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/preservation/CurationCloud.aspx
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
