Podcast/Press Release: Making the business case for digital preservation

"The amount of information in our digital universe is expected to double in size every 18 months, according to a recent report - so how do universities choose which of these new information bits to keep and which to discard? Increasingly, university managers and researchers are looking to justify the cost of preservation alongside other technical and legal issues. Now a new international task force funded by JISC and other organisations is highlighting examples of current practice in the UK, America and Europe to look at business cases for long term preservation and access. Neil Grindley, programme manager at JISC, said, "This report takes a clearheaded and hard look at some of the ideas surrounding preservation asking questions like 'why are we preserving this?' By highlighting the economic aspects of these decisions colleges and universities should be better able to prioritise which information to keep and create a more secure legacy." The Blue Ribbon task force considers a 'supply and demand' view of how individuals and organisations might manage their digital collections. The study argues that there should be incentives for people to preserve information in the public interest, perhaps to keep a digital fingerprint of a precious manuscript or observational weather data from a scientific centre now closed"