[TUHS] LoC now involved with saving digital history

Wm. G. McGrath wgm at telus.net
Thu Feb 20 22:25:44 AEST 2003


On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:02:28 +1100
Peter Jeremy <peter.jeremy at alcatel.com.au> wrote:

>Not that great a difference.  Both Oz and the US have a very
>similar Federal/state structure.  Getting US Federal funding for an
>Oz site is unlikely (but the LoC is going to need to work out how
>to handle the fact that the Internet doesn't acknowledge national
>boundaries and some of the information it needs to archive won't be
>in the US).


Yup. There are lots of issues here. The story made it to /. 
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/16/2322243&mode=thread&tid=99
and things like media longevity, data formats, and future
availability came up in the comments section. I believe we need to
somehow provide the future with the benefit of our intelligence and
experience as well as with information. And TUHS can be of help
there. Besides, a great deal of Unix history (not all of it be any
means) was created in the US: Bell Labs, Digital, Sun, IBM, SCO,
Xenix, etc. So there is clearly a US 'interest'. I guess the
question may be whether the Library is going to archive systems or
restrict itself to content, ie web pages.

	bill



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