THE I2010 DIGITAL LIBRARIES INITIATIVE: EUROPE’S CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION AT THE CLICK OF A MOUSE

A rapid dissemination of information that is not properly checked can lead to the trap of ‘Internet superficiality’. I said before that today many children assume that you can find everything about the world on the Internet. What is more, they also assume that all you find there is true. Obviously this is not the case. To translate that to the scientific world: how can you assure that researchers and students get their information instantly but only read what is worthwhile reading? The upcoming policy statement of the Commission will deal with the issue of access to scientific information. It will announce a number of actions and some experiments. The aim is to accompany in a realistic way processes that are under way and to facilitate an organised debate at European level between politicians, and between stakeholders. Digital preservation The policy statement will also draw the attention to another topic which needs to be urgently addressed. That is: digital preservation or, if you wish, the preservation of digital material. If you look at it from the preservation point of view, the ‘old technologies’ were amazingly efficient. Take the example of clay-tablets. They easily lasted for thousands of years. Paper is not so bad either, lasting a few hundreds of years. In comparison: the average life-time of a web-page is 44 days. This is about the average lifespan of a housefly. The issue of digital preservation is a major theme throughout the digital libraries initiative. It is relevant for cultural material that has been digitised, it is relevant for born digital scientific information and in fact it is crucial for any organisation that produces and stores information. The problem is that digital information is much less stable than paper. Hardware and software change very rapidly, which can make the information unreadable. And storage devises (CD-ROMs) have a limited lifetime. So in many cases constant migration of the information is necessary to keep it alive over time. And migration does not simply mean making a copy, but unfortunately you also have to check the result and sometimes adjust it. If you lose a few accents in the migration of a French text to a new software that may be annoying. But in other cases little changes can be crucial. An example: navy engineers working with diagrams of the propulsion, electrical and other systems of an aircraft carrier discovered that there were subtle changes when you opened them on newer versions of the software. The changes were little, for example a dotted line instead of a dashed line. But this kind of changes could be critical for the operations of a ship that was powered by two nuclear reactions. Not exactly the type of operation where you would like to take any risk. When you talk about digital preservation, obviously a first question is whether we need to keep all the information produced by researchers: all the research data, all the draft articles, all the relevant websites. H. Forster / The i2010 digital libraries initiative 159 Not all would be my answer, but perhaps more than we now think. You need to keep the data of experiments to repeat them or check their validity. You need information from the past to study phenomena over time. And you need to keep information to consider results in their context. For example: could this company have known, given the state of the art that their product was dangerous? If we do not actively pursue digital preservation now, we risk having a gap in our intellectual record. No one seems to feel responsible for keeping and storing digital research data. Legal deposit laws are being updated in most Member States to take into account digital material and not just paper books and journals. But still the risk of gaps remains. Within 50 years we may have lost relevant information or need to do very costly recovery work that could have been prevented. This is the risk of not-preserving, but digital preservation also presents considerable business opportunities. There is an untapped industrial potential, with service providers emerging and new preservation technologies being developed. This is an area where Europe has a chance to take a lead, if the necessary investments are made. Indeed, research into this area is crucial, for example to find ways to handle and preserve large volumes of data and/or dynamic content. Within the 7th Framework programme for R&D, digital preservation is one of the priority areas where my directorate will co-fund projects. Next to co-funding relevant projects, the Commission is trying to get the issue of digital preservation more firmly on the political agenda. A recent Commission Recommendation (August 2006) asked the Member States to address digital preservation in a structured way: through action plans with a concrete definition of responsibilities and target outputs, and by updating the relevant legislation (for example the legal deposit legislation and the copyright legislation). The upcoming policy statement on scientific information will stress the need to take up the challenges also in this area.