The Media Vault Program has released Media Vault Program Interim Report.
Here's an excerpt:
All major studies and reports on the sustainability of digital resources point to a multitude of barriers that can be clustered into four factors:
Economic: Who owns the problem, and who benefits from the solutions? Who pays for the services, long-term preservation, development, and curation? . . . .
Technical: Simple services are needed, but they are not simple to build, implement and support in our complex environment. Successful structures that can support digital scholarship must account for user needs, emerging technologies/file formats, adverse working contexts (fieldwork, offline, multi-platform), and should be supported at the enterprise scale. . . .
Political/Organizational: . . . . there are good reasons for the various service provider organizations to innovate on their own, but there is much to gain from working together on common goals and milestones. In fact, where communities have succeeded in softening the boundaries between content producers and consumers, supporters and beneficiaries, significant successes have been achieved. . . .
Social: We live in interesting times . . . and the prevalence of cheap/stolen media has produced an expectation that things should be always available, conveniently packaged, and free. Where some organizations, such as the Long Now Foundation, are hoping to "provide counterpoint to today's "Faster/cheaper" mind set and promote 'slower/better' thinking," it may be up to those of us who care deeply about the persistence of research data to step up as the seas continue to change.
