Conference to look at safeguarding future access to digital information

Conference to look at safeguarding future access to digital information

BY JENNIFER EVANS
Rice News staff

Databases and word-processing documents are convenient and powerful forms of communication, but they cannot survive years of neglect without being lost forever.

To address that problem, experts from across the nation will examine the issue of preserving today’s digital data for tomorrow’s researchers at “Vanishing Bits & Bytes: Preserving Information,” the 10th annual Houston Conference on Health Informatics to be held May 8 in the Texas Medical Center and co-sponsored by Rice University’s Fondren Library.

Vice Provost and University Librarian Chuck Henry said, “Fondren Library and Rice University are pleased to be a sponsor of this conference. The complexity and fragility of digital medical information is not widely understood, and it’s an important issue. Future research and scholarship depend on our ability to preserve digital resources, and we hope to contribute to those efforts.”

M.J. Figard, digital initiatives librarian at Houston Academy of Medicine–Texas Medical Center Library, is the lead organizer of the conference. “As with the general public, many researchers are so wrapped up in their day-to-day work that they forget the electronic media on which they put their data and thoughts are very impermanent,” she said. “Preservation is not something that is foremost in their minds today, but it well may be tomorrow. And it certainly will be for future researchers.”

The conference, which will run from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the University of Texas School of Nursing, 6901 Bertner Ave., will focus on answering questions about how the information can be preserved, what should be preserved and who should preserve it. Creators of electronic information will learn about the issues inherent in preserving information created in an easily manipulated and easily destroyed medium as well as the role of libraries and archives in the preservation process.

Samuel Kaplan, one of the three featured speakers, is chair of the national advisory committee for PubMed Central, a digital archive of life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health aimed at preserving and maintaining unrestricted access to electronic biomedical literature.

Kaplan’s principal concern with regard to the preservation of digital information encompassing the basic scientific literature is that the literature remains universally available to the largest number of readers and authors possible, and that it remains uncorrupted over the long term. “These were not really serious issues when ‘print’ was the medium, but that is no longer the case,” said Kaplan, an active publishing scientist responsible for the generation of a portion of the scientific literature through the American Society for Microbiology.

Kaplan, who is also a professor and chair of the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Texas Health Science Center–Houston, will discuss at the conference concerns about preserving research data from the perspective of an active researcher and creator of information as well as PubMed Central’s role in preservation.

Also giving an overview of the problems with keeping and retrieving electronic information over the long term, including what “long term” means in the digital world, and some examples of successful preservation methods will be:

• Victoria Reich, director and co-founder of the LOCKSS Program at Stanford University, who will speak about saving electronic published information through replicating the information at numerous sites, why this is a feasible method, the problems it solves and the ones it doesn’t.

• Clifford Lynch, director of the Coalition for Networked Information, who will give an overview of the electronic preservation issue, speaking about how the lack of preservation of electronic medical and academic records and research affects the medical and education communities. He will also speak about possible solutions, including who should be involved in the preservation process.

A panel discussion will examine experts’ experiences with electronic preservation, what they need, what has worked and what hasn’t worked.

Figard said, “The conference is directed foremost to medical and academic professionals whose research and work is created in electronic formats. However, the issues are important for anyone who is creating work on computers and expecting that work to be available at some time in the future.”

The conference, which is open to the public, is sponsored by the Houston Academy of Medicine–Texas Medical Center Library, Rice University’s Fondren Library and the University of Houston libraries. The cost is $50, which includes lunch and parking. To register, visit <http://resource.library.tmc.edu/Conference.htm>.