Monday, March 30, 2009

Spring CNI Plenary

I can finally reveal the mysterious talk I referred to in this comment; it is the opening plenary at CNI's Spring Task Force meeting one week from today. In essence, the talk is a look back at Jeff Rothenberg's 1995 Scientific American article "Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents" which asks:
  • What led Jeff to his dire predictions?
  • Would one make the same dire predictions now?
  • If not, what dire predictions would one make, and why?
This talk arose because Cliff Lynch invited me to give a talk at UC Berkeley's School of Information last November. He liked it enough to ask me to give it at CNI and I agreed, thinking I had already written it. But once I thought about it more, and considered the very different audience, I realized that it needed to be almost completely rewritten. I'm still revising it, based on feedback from giving it to the Stanford Library staff.

CNI will post the slides after the talk, and I plan to post here a commentary on them providing links to sources and additional details. You will be able to see how the discussions here were a very valuable resource. Thank you all.

Monday, March 23, 2009

2009 FAST conference

I attended the 2009 FAST Conference in San Francisco almost a month ago. This post was delayed because, as I mentioned in this comment, I've been working on an important talk which draws from recent discussions on this blog. The papers are on the web following Usenix's commendable open access policy. Follow me below the fold for my highlights.