On Sun, 2006-09-04 at 09:53 -0400, Vika Zafrin wrote:
Dan,
The Electronic Literature Organization has been pondering more or less the same thing. Their PAD (Preservation, Archival, Dissemination) project
Doesn't surprise me. Obviously the issue is a big one and one sees more and more librarians on digital projects for exactly this reason, I think.
I will confess my thoughts were prompted by paging through some of the more rare items in my collection and some work a colleague of mine is doing on interfaces: many things done on personal computers from the early 1990s onwards might still be recoverable and storable and of interest to members of this community if there were collected on a server somewhere. I was thinking how need it might be if we had a library of some of the older, out-of-print disks and floppies available to members of DM. Obviously copyright issues would need to be dealt with, but it seems to me an author deposit system might work well, and to the extent that presses are involved at all, they could probably be convinced to give permission, since the technology in many cases would be obsolete by now.
Really just a synapse firing. The U of L is suddenly awash in surplus servers (all quite low end) and I was wondering what I could do with one or two.
"seeks to identify threatened and endangered electronic literature and to maintain accessibility, encourage stability, and ensure availability of electronic works for readers, institutions, and scholars. PAD seems to supplement and contribute to the efforts of other projects aimed and preserving digital media, and other projects dealing with textual materials, by focusing on the particular problems of electronic literature, which can combine the complexity of a multimedia compter program with the demands of a literary text."
Maybe it would be worth talking to them?..
http://eliterature.org/programs/pad/
-Vika
-- Vika Zafrin Director, Virtual Humanities Lab http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/vhl/
Brown University Box 1942 Providence, RI 02912 USA (401)863-3984
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