Scripting News: Future-safe archives

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Future-safe archives

The discussion about future-safing content continues.

I had lunch on Sunday with Jeff Ubois, he's been working on archiving for many years. He sent me an article by Alfred de Grazia, explaining the problem for academics. When a scholar dies, he or she leaves behind a life of work, papers, unfinished manuscripts, notebooks, pictures, recordings, and nowadays computers, disks and websites. Their family and university generally don't know what to do with them, often the problem is given to the libraries.

Our thought is to try to anticipate the problem, while the scholar is alive, and now that our work is largely electronic, to have it future-safe at all times, leave no work for the librarian, let the families and colleagues deal with the death of a relative and colleague at a personal level, and not as a professional problem.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:33 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Feb Apr