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SUMMARY:Beyond The Digital Delusion: A Case for Lossy Preservation - Micah
  Beck (University of Tennessee)
DTSTART:20100712T100000Z
DTEND:20100712T110000Z
UID:TALK25387@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Eiko Yoneki
DESCRIPTION:When a physical object is captured in digital form it is often
  thought that  it can then be preserved forever without degradation.  This
  is a form of a general misconception regarding the management of informat
 ion that I call "The Digital Delusion." What is true is that the digital r
 epresentation of an object can be copied and moved with a high degree of r
 eliability\, and increasing medium densities allow ever greater amounts of
  data to be stored. A common inference is that arbitrary amounts of data c
 an be preserved indefinitely with high accuracy. In this talk I explain wh
 y this conclusion does not follow\, and examine the implications for long-
 term digital preservation.\n\nConsider scalability trade-offs in data pres
 ervation: How much data can actually be preserved\, for how long\, with wh
 at accuracy and at what cost? Current approaches to large-scale long-term 
 preservation assume that that accuracy can be maintained at a high enough 
 level to be considered "lossless."  Archivists assume that digital objects
  will be preserved without corruption\, and believe that exceptions will b
 e rare enough for the resulting losses of information to be accepted or pe
 rhaps addressed after the fact. I will argue that resource constraints and
  organizational issues make the eventual loss of data unavoidable when pre
 served at scale\, and that responsible archivists should deploy "lossy" ap
 proaches to preservation which are designed to be resilient to such corrup
 tion.\n\nMicah's web page: http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mbeck/\n
LOCATION:FW26\, Computer Laboratory\, William Gates Builiding
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