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By David Rothman

From Karen Schneider via John Mark Ockerbloom:

It may not be sexy or all that visible; you can’t download it to your iPod; it’s not right under your nose every day. In fact, you may not be aware of one of the most important activities where librarians have engaged their values and skills for the last decade.

Nevertheless, please sit up and listen. Close to a decade’s worth of digital preservation efforts just took a major hit in House Joint Resolution 20, which zeroes out $47 million in appropriations for crucial work in this area.

In fact, if you added up all the NDIIP projects, I’d bet you’d have over a century of blood, sweat, toil and tears dedicated to preserving cultural memory…

Post-9/11 and post-Katrina, you’d think our gummint would get that you can’t put all of your cultural eggs in one basket—that we absolutely must come up with trustworthy methods and protocols for ensuring we preserve our digital heritage. Then again, with such minimal adult supervision at the helm for these past six years, while the world heats to a boil and we foment war with hostile nations, maybe the assumption is we won’t be around much longer to appreciate the fruits of our labors…

 
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