Jesse Wilkins wrote:
>It wouldn't surprise me that the hot dog vendors in SF pitch their dogs
as being cooked "in the cloud". :)

If they steam their hot dogs, I guess they wouldn't be too far off base!

In the November/December, 2009 issue of the IMJ, there was an
interesting news bite about the Library of Congress National Digital
Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIPP). To quote:
"The goal of the program is to develop a national strategy to collect,
preserve, and make available digital content, especially material
created only in digital formats.<snip> The pilot will focus on a new
cloud-based service, DuraCloud, developed and hosted by the non-profit
DuraSpace organization.<snip> The pilot will demonstrate bi-directional
replication of content among partners in the United States and Europe."

Digital repositories for archives, museums, libraries, etc... are best
developed in partnership, both for long term cost sharing/financial
stability reasons, but also because of the ability to replicate content
across multiple locations in the event disaster strikes one part of the
networked storage. This enhances the preservation of the digital
material. Its interesting to me that this concept, which I believe
predates cloud computing, is being examined within a cloud computing
framework. IN my opinion, this may ultimately make shared digital
repositories more of an attainable goal, as they are occurring as part
of a larger industry trend, not simply within the world of
archives/libraries/museums. Of course, as Jesse and others have pointed
out, "cloud computing" is a rather amorphous term right now, but I think
it is encouraging that a vision of distributed IT infrastructure, being
developed primarily for large scale cost purposes, may actually help in
the development of effective digital archiving technologies.

Its rare that archival records keeping and cost effectiveness converge;
archives is not a "bottom line" effort. When those elements do converge,
preservation is enhanced as it becomes financially sustainable over
time. 

Dwight Wallis, CRM
Records Administrator
Multnomah County Records Management Program
1620 SE 190th Avenue
Gresham, OR 97233
phone: (503)988-3741
fax: (503)988-3754
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