As data as a scholarly object continues to grow in importance in the research community, librarians are undertaking increasing responsibilities regarding data management and curation. New library initiatives include assisting researchers in finding data sets for reuse; locating and hosting repositories for required archiving; consultations on…

An unprecedented amount of information encompassing almost every facet of human activities across the world is generated daily in the form of zeros and ones, and that is often the only form in which such information is recorded. A good fraction of this information needs to be preserved for periods of time ranging from a few years to centuries.…

Archives have always had an aura of neutrality and coolness that masks the heat behind the data they record: births, marriages, crimes, wars, business dealings, genocides and deaths. Long thought of as the musty haunts of scholars with a specialized interest in the demographics of Rome or 15th-century France, archives have been seen as controlled…

Over the past several decades, millions of digital objects of significant scientific, economic, cultural, and historic value have been published and distributed to libraries and archives on removable media. Providing long-term access to these documents, media files, and software executables is an increasingly complex task because of dependencies…

Social science data, existing in a format that can be manipulated by computing machinery, can be used for many purposes in addition to those for which they were initially collected. Scholars and government planners should hve ready and equal access to such material and these groups will be best served if they are informed regarding the…

On January 24, 2000, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) convened a group of experts from different domains of the information resources community to address the question, "What is an authentic digital object?" Five writers--an archivist, a digital library expert, a documentary editor and special collections…

Part of a continuing series on freedom of information issues, this report reviews the handling of the papers of presidents of the United States after they have left office and alludes briefly to access to papers of other public officials. It specifically discusses the issue of access to the records of President Richard Nixon and discusses some of…

Digital materials are vulnerable to a number of different kinds of failures, including decay of the digital media, loss due to hackers and viruses, accidental deletions, natural disasters, and bankruptcy of the institution holding the collection. Digital archives can best survive failures if they have made several copies of their collections at…

Reports on a three-year research project entitled "The Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records." The project aims to identify and define in a purely theoretical way both the by-products of electronic systems and the methods for protecting the integrity of those which constitute evidence of action. (AEF)

A discussion of the three major functions of a film archive: input, storage and output. (HB)

Discusses the Peirce On-line Resource Testbed (PORT), a digital archive of primary data. Highlights include knowledge processing testbeds for digital resource development; Peirce's pragmatism in operation; PORT and knowledge processing; obstacles to archive access; and PORT as a paradigm for critical control in knowledge processing. (AEF)

Presents brief survey of commercial microform collections that provide effective and economic means of collecting and distributing materials in women's studies and offers suggestions for future publications. Development of "original microform collections," problems for researchers, and selected checklist of commercially published microform…

Discusses a new vision of scientific publishing that is emerging in the Physics community; it is based on three fundamental elements: (1) a preprint server, (2) an electronic peer-reviewed, edited journal, and (3) an electronic archive of past published papers. Relates problems with libraries and the American Physical Society as electronic…

The great research collections of the United States have resulted, in part, from a long and productive collaboration among scholars, librarians, and archivists. This booklet focuses on the documentation of, access to, and preservation of dance heritage. It discusses the cultural and intellectual value of dance and articulates what elements of…

Museums hold enormous amounts of information in collections management systems and publish academic and scholarly research in print journals, exhibition catalogs, virtual museum presentations, and community publications. Much of this rich content is unavailable to web search engines or otherwise gets lost in the vastness of the World Wide Web. The…