Corraling Wild BitsThe gist: Intellectual capital is lost when bits run free. Watch institutions attempt to corral bits to preserve intellectual capital. Watch individuals preserve bits to organize memory. Watch governments store bits to maintain control. Driving metaphors:
Announcement:MyLifeBits is a Microsoft project for storing all of one's digital media, including documents, images, sounds and videos. You can keep your life stored as bits. You could do a Google search on your life.Supposing one did keep virtually everything--would there be any value to it? Well, there is an existence proof of value. The following exist in abundance: shoeboxes full of photos, photo albums & framed photos, home movies/ videos, old bundles of letters bookshelves and filing cabinets. (Gemmell, et al, 2002) Announcement:DSpace a digital repository project at MITThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries have announced initial development of the DSpace Federation with six major research universities: Columbia University, Cornell University, Ohio State University, and the Universities of Rochester, Toronto, and Washington. institutional: dSpace Save work, repurpose content. Science metrics. DSpace potentially represents a convergence between two traditional functions of libraries - archiving information that will be historically useful, and providing a large, accessible and searchable body of current information. A number of threads are coming together to make a project like DSpace desirable. “A growing percentage of grants are requiring that data be archived,” says Bill Jordan, head of distributed systems at University Libraries. "We expect that will mean an increasing volume of scientific data will be archived than was historically the case." Result: Watch governments attempt to construct and exploit information archives: Information Awareness Office The collaborative reasoning and decision-support technologies will solve existing coordination problems by enabling analysts from one agency to collaborate effectively with analysts in other agencies. A major challenge to terrorist detection today is the inability to quickly search, correlate, and share data from databases maintained legally by our intelligence, counterintelligence andlaw enforcement agencies. The collaborative reasoning and decision-support technologies will punch holes in these 'stovepipes.' DARPA's Information Awareness Office (IAO) and Total Information Awareness (TIA) Program, Frequency Asked Questions: http://www.darpa.mil/iao/TIA_FAQs.pdfInformation Awareness Office at http://www.darpa.mil/iao/ personal: MyLifeBits psychosis The forgetfulness curve, created by researcher Thomas Ebbinghaus, shows after four weeks after hearing about a product, people only remember 5% of what they heard. The Ebbinghaus study is an illustration about retentiveness; the brain retains information it considers important to the individual and ‘forgets’ information not deemed relevant. (Arbitron, 1994) In terms of radio advertising, it is crucial for the advertiser to continue to repeat the message so that the individual will retain and act on it. web: The Wayback machine Snapshots of a changing web. Cogprints Content Management: Content Silo Trap - The Rockley Group http://www.psychology.org/links/Environment_Behavior_Relationships/Memory/ If one way to increase product value is to make products free, then many things now free may contain potential value not yet perceived. Kevin Kelly, Maxims for the Network Economy at http://www.kk.org/newrules/selected_maxims.html preservation: bit storage and functional preservation DSpace identifies two levels of digital preservation: bit preservation, and functional preservation. Bit preservation ensures that a file remains exactly the same over time – not a single bit is changed – while the physical media evolve around it. Functional preservation goes further: the file does change over time so that the material continues to be immediately usable in the same way it was originally while the digital formats (and the physical media) evolve over time. Some file formats can be functionally preserved using straightforward format migration (e.g. TIFF images or XML documents). Other formats are proprietary, or for other reasons are much harder to preserve functionally. Many projects already doing this. Date: March 2003 |
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