Weibel Lines

BOOK REVIEW: Guns, Germs, and Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel,
Jared Diamond (1997)

Why do westerners have so much cargo? That is the question, asked by a New Guinea tribesman, that motivated the author to pull together a lifetime of insight in this explanation of the march of human history.  The title captures the main themes.

The book earned a Pulitzer Prize and long print runs for its author, and for good reason. Insights emerge from seed distribution studies, linguistic analysis, conquistadors, the Polynesian Diaspora, food production, the wheel, and many other ideas

The author’s intellectual scaffolding carries the natural history of mankind on its substantial framework, and it is tightly argued and convincing in most respects (at least for a lay reader such as myself). Many of the ideas in this book are controversial.  Beliefs about cultural hegemony and dominance are commonplace and difficult to resist, particularly in this moment of seemingly unending clashes of civilizations. This book provides a framework within which to understand the gifts (and curses) that geography, climate, and microbiology confer on the development of civilizations, setting aside arguments of who is better or smarter.

My Seattle housemate observes that only science can ask questions of God, as science alone confers a methodology for judging answers without risk of self deception. This is true only for science that aspires to prediction rather than explanation, however. Facts are far less malleable in the face of an experimental result than within the comfortable argument of a post-facto explanation.  At times, though, Diamond evokes particularly sharp focus, as with the natural experiment of the Maori-Moriori collision in the Chatham Islands. Even a liberal might look a second time at questions of defense spending in the light of this startling piece of evidence.

It is in the postulation of refutable facts that science gives us confidence. Explanatory ‘science’ such as this compelling book can never convince as reliably. Nonetheless, within the intersection of the melding points of societies and the melting points of alloys, Diamond creates a rigorous, fascinating, and convincing story of cultural destinies that sheds light and enlightenment.  But yikes… 30 pages of acknowledgements? Thank heaven they came at the end.

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My esteemed colleague, Diane Hillmann, of Cornell University Libraries, recently took me to task for failing to provide metadata for the images that decorate my blog.  I told her it was intentional.  "I know", she replied, icily. 

The picture in this post was taken somewhere over the California Central Valley from my window seat on United flight 351, from Seattle to Los Angeles. I was travelling to the WebWise 2006 conference, about which more later. Seat 6F. 

 

Identifier Ideology: Opacity and Semantics

My earliest exposure to the ideological battles that swirl around identifiers was in the Uniform Resource Name (URN) ‘discussions’ that took place within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) back in the early nineties. Those meetings foundered again and again on the same issues, few of which had anything to do with technology or engineering. The IETF was not a good place to pursue solutions to these problems, but there wasn’t anyplace else to carry the work forward. The impact of these deliberations has been desultory at best.

One of the ideologies that plagued us then and now has to do with whether an identifier is opaque or has embedded semantics (I’ll cautiously refer to this latter group as semantic identifiers, recognizing the potential ambiguity of this terminology).

An opaque identifier is simply one without any trace of embedded meaning - pure as the driven know-what-it-is. They are homely, unfriendly, and as rare within our IT infrastructure as is purity elsewhere in human affairs. But they are also as impervious to bit rot and semantic deterioration as any identifier can be, and hence embody neutral virtue.
Sean McGrath posted a note just this past week on this issue. Sean is firmly in the camp that believes identifiers with embedded semantics are bad for us:

Ultimately, all semantic identifiers are incorrect

There are both philosophic and practical reasons to hold this position. It is easy to identify failure modes for semantic identifiers, and if you are curating assets for which identity persistence is paramount, these failures will find you as surely as surely as water flows downhill.
Why, then, does anyone create anything other than opaque identifiers? Because identifiers serve multiple masters. To assign and manage identifiers is to balance countervailing requirements and to make compromises to satisfy those masters.

It is helpful to examine the nature of the semantics we find in identifiers with an eye towards (a) understanding the pitfalls and relative risks, and (b) facing up to how pure we are (or want to be) in resisting the siren call of  reader-friendly names.

Location and Resolution

It should be obvious why we want actionable identifiers. Click and go. But remembering an IP address is a lot harder than remembering a domain name, so the Domain Name System (DNS) was developed to map semantic names onto unmemorable numeric identifiers (you might be a geek if you actually know your IP address!). Is that good or bad? Depends.

Branding

The URL is a powerful branding instrument. Organizations want their brands in their asset identifiers, and will generally fight hard to maintain that territory.
Apple.com, OCLC.org, and LoC.gov are shingles on the Internet, and they become embedded in identifiers as a matter of business practice.
Product brand names are similarly important:

http://www.apple.com/ipod/ipod.html

Lots of 'valuable' semantics in that URL. 

Movies all have URLs names.  Which of these do you suppose Warner Brothers wants used widely?  Which is more useful for a consumer?

http://wippub.warnerbros.com/
movie/goodnight/goodnight.html

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433383/

Transaction Identifiers

Transaction information often ends up as identifiers, though few identifiers are less persistent. Consider the following identifiers for the same resource in the same system:

http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/
external-search/701-9964227-5871503?
tag=bookstore0e86-20&
keyword=Suitable+Boy+A&mode=books

http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/
ASIN/0060786523/qid=1140048418/
sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_3_1/701-9964227-5871503

OK… strictly speaking these URLs do not identify the resource, they identify a surrogate that will lead you to a purchase option. Much more a locator than an identifier, but we pass around such links because they are useful to us.

What about this one?

http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/
wcpa/isbn/1857990889

Inspection of these resources reveals quite a lot of semantics, both about the site and the resource. There is a lot of recognizable instance metadata embedded in the URL.  There are other approaches to this idea that have some traction in the community where appropriate copy problem is manifest: the OpenURL is intended to address this problem.  More on this another time.

Conceptual identity

There is another element of location that is becoming more common: location in a conceptual hierarchy. If the Semantic Web is ever to fulfill its promise, it will require that we figure out how to assign conceptual identifiers in a manner that is coherent across vocabularies and languages. And like so many of these problems, the technical solution is less important than widespread adoption of consistent conventions.

Structural elements of identifiers

There are several kinds of semantics found in some identifiers that have nothing to do with the referent of the identifier, but rather are artifacts of the system of assignment:

Sequence is a common attribute in identifiers, and is in fact a kind of semantics.  OCLC numbers are assigned to records entered into WorldCat on a sequential basis. Simple, but it does convey a certain degree of semantics.  In some systems even this clue about sequence can be important and even problematic. Can I assume something about the next item in a sequence? Is it a security problem? It can be.

Other systems embed time stamps. LC Card Numbers (LCCN) include low resolution time-stamps: the first two digits (separated from the remainder of the number by a dash) represent the year that the card was created, and so provide a hint about the date of publication). I don’t know an example off hand, but undoubtedly someone is using the unix seconds-since-January-1-1970 as the basis for identifiers (a rather higher resolution convention than is necessary for most assets that we care about).

ISBNs have country and publisher palimpsests embedded in them, and many identifiers include checksums to afford some measure of error detection.

Now, should we feel as strongly about this sort of semantics in our identifiers? Well, as LCCNs include assignments from more than a century, somebody is going to have to fix them. When 2038 rolls around, the Unix time stamp will break. Are check sums a problem?

What is clear is that it is unlikely that very many identifier systems will be as ideologically pure as, say, the ARK identifier system is, and that we’ll have to cope with these meaningful warts in a world that is ever-more dependant on digital identifiers.  Lovers of Irony will note that this excellent piece on the virture of opaque identifiers by John Kunze is most easily (only?) found via its semantic identifier.

Happy Valentine's Dayhttp://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Born Digital Birth Defects

The standard descriptive boilerplate associated with the term identifier in the Internet domain is globally-unique persistent identifier, variously acronymulated [a - cro - NIM - you - lated] as UIDs or GUIDs.

My dabbling in Open WorldCat this past week reminds me that there is another sense of uniqueness that we aren’t very explicit about, as it is difficult to achieve and requires standards of community practice and infrastructure that are currently rudimentary at best. We’d like our identifiers to be not only globally unique (unambiguous in the global addressing system—the Domain Name System), but it would be nice if there was exactly one identifier per resource. In the ideal world of the future, then, assets will be not only be born-digital, but born-digitally-identified, with a unique globally unique identifier coined with every relevant resource, once and for all. Right?

There are several reasons why this has not happened and, in fact, cannot happen. David Weinberger articulated some of the reasons in a recent post in his Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization. David has  interesting things to say about unique IDs, including:

It’s a complex field. That’s because providing unique IDs is an ontological problem. You need to know the level of abstraction at which you’re dealing.

Yep. And that level of abstraction is as much an attribute of the context as it is an extensive property of the object-of-identity. The best you can hope for is something that is roughly right within the context of the process that spawns it.

Assets often morph and subdivide and coalesce into and with other things, and as that happens the appropriate identification granularity changes.

So, if your digital systems use identifiers to pull things together, and the context changes (instead of a book with cartoons, you now want to identify a particular cartoon within that book, for example) you may need to assign a new identifier. The derived asset will have a relationship to the original, and the identifier will similarly have a relationship to the original identifier, but registering and tracking such assignments and relationships is non-trivial.

And who is to stop someone else from also identifying the asset (or a derivative) with yet another GUID? Well, no one, of course. So, we often end up with the digital equivalent of the Geneva Museum of Natural History’s two headed turtle (named Janus… what else?)... but less novel and far more complicated to feed and care for.

This is NOT my fault

The Meme of Four: Lorcan succumbed to Karen who in turn was subverted by Librarian in Black... yada yada... heaven knows where these things start.  My monthly report entry for the day will be to NOT propagate the infection further.  Also, I must note that the number 4 is very bad karma in some Eastern Cultures, so readers in Asia should proceed with due caution.

Four favorite places to eat

• The Flying Fish (Seattle)
• Any noodle place in Japan (well, pretty much any place in Japan)
• Around any campfire
• My mother’s house in Savannah

Four Managers I’ve had at OCLC

• Mike McGill – hired me… wondered if I thought I might get bored in the library game?
• Martin Dillon – taught me how to contribute to the GDP
• Terry Noreault – gave me the latitude to take risks
• Lorcan Dempsey – arranged for me to take a sabbatical (there were other choices)

Four things I want to take home from Seattle

• A book-like-object on Identifiers
• A skin & frame kayak of my own making
• A mission
• An ache in my heart

Four favorite books

• To Kill a Mockingbird
• A Soldier of the Great War
• A River Runs Through It
• Love in the Time of Cholera

Four astonishing experiences in the service of metadata (I could list a hundred without stopping for breath)

• The Taj Mahal at dawn
• Sleeping in the 14th century on the Mongolian steppe
• Cinque Terra at any time of day
• Verdi at St Chapelle... I think it was Verdi... I was mostly looking at the windows

Four dumbest things I’ll admit to (here again... so many choices!)

• Walking to my Senior prom in my brother’s white sportscoat… without a date.
• Sure… we can get to the ski cabin in one hard day of skiing…!
• Buying an Italian leather couch… ok… I’ve said it... You were right, Marguerite… Its pretty, but its cold in the winter and you stick to it in the summer (but Buddy loves it!)
• See... we'll do this simple metadata set, and authors will write their own metadata...!

Four favorite pieces of technology

• Japanese chisels –sign all your stuff in blood... painlessly!
• Canon G-3 digital camera (since replaced with a G-6)
• 18 inch Laguna bandsaw – the sweetest power tool ever to taste my blood
• Any Lie Nielson tool

Four Epiphanies

• Writing a statistics program (HP Basic) in less time than a single iteration of calculations by hand (1972)
• Starting  the engine of a Volkswagen Rabbit I rebuilt... my blind mechanic determined that the pistons were ok by assessing them with his tongue.  I wouldn't lie about such a thing!
• The Columbus Montessori Education Center Playground
• The hour of our first-born's birth: Thou shalt spend the rest of thy natural life in worry (and thats only if things go well)

So far, its working

The New Cooperative Cataloging

Readers of an earlier post on my blog will have seen that I dived into the Open WorldCat Not-Quite-A-Wiki Book Review Cache for the first time as a reviewer this week. I also posted a note on why it is critical for libraries to participate more fully in the Linking Economy [First Class Objects and the Currency of Linking]. Not just important, but critical.

So, I did one myself… gotta eat your own dog food, eh? OK, well, you have to establish an account (user name, password, that stuff).  Another password to manage… argh. But still… it’s important, so I did it.

Then cometh the dreaded TERMS & CONDITIONS, in which I learn, among other things, that by contributing content, I agree to defend OCLC in any legal disputes arising from my content.  My immediate  vision is of Lil’ Ole Me… armed with naught but fountain pen against the onslaught of Smaug and his law clerks, defending the Mothership from harm (sorry about the mixed allusions... too many allegories lately).

Well, that made me swallow hard. Visions of legal fees withheld from my salary for the rest of my unnatural life. How in heaven’s name are we going to get people to contribute time and effort in the service of the Bibliographic Cooperative if we indenture them legally in the process? Well, my immediate response was to whine about it (those who know me will not find this startling).  One reply to my whine (by a colleague with legal training who does not work for OCLC) went something like: ‘well, of course OCLC has to do this. Look at the international cartoon crisis!’

Hmmmm... that brought me up short.

OK… the risks are not zero. But risk aversion threatens to obscure the values we stand for. Some of those risks, of course, are real; others have the character of being probabilistically small but of horrendous consequences. Mostly it’s impossible to tell ahead of time.  Therein lies the rub.

The biggest risk of all, for our profession, is not to be at the table, not to stand up for what we believe, not to bring our professional values to bear in the most effective manner possible. In the present case, that means enriching the public link structure of bibliography.

My exhortations:
To OCLC:

• Make WorldCat Wiki reviews link-addressable and harvestable
• Perhaps use Creative Commons licenses to establish the content as solidly part of the intellectual commons that is our foundation (we’ve done this in the past with WebJunction, as I learned yesterday in my visit to the WebJunction offices in Seattle).

To Librarians:

• Let nothing you read go un-reviewed.  Don’t feel you are competent to review your physics library’s latest treatise on string theory? Take responsibility for recruiting your patrons to do it.
• We have the scarcest asset on the Web – Public Trust. Advise your users. Make the creation of linkable advisory content a personal priority. 100,000 librarians x 1 review per week x 50 weeks = a pretty good start.
• Take the risk.

To Libraries:

• Recognize and promote this effort. Provide incentives to staff. This is the New Cooperative Cataloging for the Web.

A note about the image in this post.  It is from a larger work by Falah Shwan, an Iraqi refugee living in Columbus.  I'm not really sure about my reproduction rights -- Marguerite and I purchased the work from which it is excerpted, and it has occurred to me that it is a perfect logo for the Radical Militant Libraian T-shirts that we all should have ;-).  If there is interest, we will try to track down the artist and see about licensing it.

BOOK REVIEW: The Soul of Money (Lynne Twist)

I encountered The Soul of Money  by Lynne Twist in discussion with Seattle neighbors, who graciously lent it to me on our first meeting.  Now there is trust for you.  I originally couldn't find the link to this book in OWC, but thanks to more knowledgeable colleagues, it is now linked approriately (thanks, Bob, Jeff, and Thom!)

The title of this book is a natural attention-getter, though I think not very apt, as I will suggest below. It attracted me in part because I’m of an age when I can see more clearly to the end of my working life than to the beginning, and have (somewhat belatedly) started paying more attention to money and to retirement instruments. Makes you think of something sharp that could hurt you, doesn’t it? But there’s nothing here for retirement planning, other than advice on living better.  On second thought, maybe it is about retirement planning.

Defining one’s relationship to money is inevitably a lifelong endeavor. One does it explicitly or subliminally, but one does it. “To not decide is to decide”, as Camus wrote.  For many years I’ve thought... I should be paying more attention to this stuff. Then my eyes would glaze over.  Reminds me of the joke about the Surgeon General’s report on the health consequences of smoking: give up reading!

This book is about making our relationship to money more explicit, and about turning the default on its head. That is, making our money, whether a bucket-full or a handful, an expression of our values and ideals, rather than the money (or fear of scarcity) driving our life decisions. Yes, the author has a long history as a fundraiser as well as a consciousness raiser.

The thrust of the book is to put your soul in your money and direct it wisely. To do so, Twist suggests, it is important to change one’s way of thinking about what she labels the Toxic Myths of Scarcity:

1. There’s not enough
2. More is better
3. That’s just the way it is

Some of the ‘truths’ elaborated here will be familiar, even time-worn.  Her arguments about the pertinent scientific evidence are as much ideology as economics and evolution. She is more persuasive when she speaks from her heart, and the heart of her experiences, about acting successfully in the real world of hunger and poverty, or in conversations with her dying mother.

Think you know what loss and commitment are? Turn to page 198, midway down the page, and read about the Guatemalan woman who made her way to the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. It set a new standard for me. The transformational power of love? Read the story of the Bosnian woman a couple pages later.

There are many moving stories in this book, but it is much more than a compendium of heart-rending reality.  Twist proposes ways of coping with the pathology of modern living… ways of thinking and speaking that can help lead us to ways of acting, and being happier for it. In a section entitled the Power of Conversation, she argues:

We think we live in the world… but we don’t. We live in our conversation about the world….The conversation we have with ourselves and with others-–the thoughts that grip our attention—has enormous power over how we feel, what we experience, and how we see the world in that moment.

I found considerable power in her arguments.  In particular, a bolstering of courage to address the most dangerous of her myths of scarcity – the paralysis of “That’s just the way it is.”

Now I’m wondering how I can get my kids to read this book.

BOOK REVIEW: His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman)

Last October I went to a very exciting conference at CERN, birthplace of the Web.  It was an OAI conference, and afforded many great bloggable moments (some of which you may wish to review in my October archives, he opined shamelessly).  One of my favorite talks at the conference was  by Wilma Mossink, an intellectual property attorney for the  SURF Foundation in the Netherlands.

Wilma made several welcome book recommendations to me, including the longest novel in the English Language, which I will review as soon as I can take a trip long enough to finish it.  The following review is of a fantasy science fiction trilogy that she recommended. 

Allegorical adventure fantasy has assumed a popular place in our cultural: the Tolkien trilogy, Harry Potter, the Star Wars series, and of course the Wizard of Oz, are prominent examples. Philip Pullman’s trilogy (His Dark Materials) may not reach the levels of acceptance and commercial success of these others, but it is worthy of attention, and full of philosophical and moral questions that comprise a curriculum for emerging sentience.

As a whole, the books deconstruct human nature into competitive or cooperative factions (warlike, but trustworthy armored bears, ghastly ghosts and ghoulish ghasts, Lilliputian spies, witches who breed with men, but outlive them many times over, eventually to succumb to accumulated heartbreak (an interesting model). The three books (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) comprise a thousand pages of swashbuckling adventure, page-turning peril, courage, betrayal, sacrifice, yearning, and the coming of age played against a background of titanic struggles and epic battles.

There is plenty to engage and, delight, and make you read faster for the suspense of it all (though, never a doubt that justice will out… they don’t call it fantasy for nothing). And quandaries a plenty… is it better to suffer a gray eternity, identity intact, than rejoin the vibrant world of the living, but without one’s personal consciousness? Is there anything to choose between soul-less rationalism and the crushing, duplicitous control of religious bureaucracy? Is there a fate worse than losing one’s soul… or a cause worth risking it for?

The protagonists of this multiple-world epic are a young girl, Lyra, as heroine-of-destiny and a young boy, Will, of stolid courage and uncompromising perseverance. In Lyra’s world, humans wear their souls as metamorphic anima, literally, sometimes, on their sleeves. Their ‘daemons’ change form with mood and circumstance… mouse, sparrow, dog, snake, eagle, ermine… until they eventually ‘settle’ into a totem suitable to their host at the time of puberty.  No fate could be crueler than to lose one’s daemon… and no propriety stronger than its inviolate sanctity. Too bad reality isn’t like that.  But her world is one of many, and the interconnection of those worlds is a dominant motif of the story, woven across centuries of conflict and sovereignty, locales as divergent as Oxford, Muscovy, Alaska, Texas and myriad underworlds. Will comes from a time and place similar to our own (also near Oxford, but in a modern UK), without a daemon, but by no means soul-less.

 Tolkien, a biblical scholar and editor of the Jerusalem Bible, gave us a rich allegory of romance, temptation, and the triumph of good over evil. His detail (including maps and language) imparted a sense of reality, but I am among those who read them more out of duty than delight, (consuming all of a summer in the task). The movies have made them more accessible in their cinematic reductions and embedded them deeper than ever in our popular mythology.  I found Pullman’s work less scholarly but more engaging, but also inclined to wander in overly-complex constructions of time and space.

There is more caricature than character in many of Pullman’s secondary actors, and its is easy enough to get lost in the metaphorical maze of twisty little passages. Still, not for a moment could I have considered abandoning Lyra and Will in their quest. The story works on many levels, and offers infinitely more substance than most of the media pap fed to children and adults alike. They are commendable as allegory, and full of entertainment and delight as adventure stories.

 

 

First Class Objects and the Currency of Linking

I posted a book review a couple of weeks ago, a superficial and fluffy piece about a rather good book I got for Christmas, and as a good soldier in the Campaign to Enrich Cooperative Bibliography, I linked the book to its record in OpenWorldCat. I thought initially that I might put my review into the WorldCat Wiki, but lo!… there were already, not one, but TWO reviews there, and one of them was a lot better than I was prepared (ok ok… capable) of writing without enrolling in a graduate program in modern Western literature. So, I linked to the book and left it at that.

 About an hour after my post hit the street, I got email from Lorcan asking had I seen his review of the book in OWC? As they say… you can run, but you can’t hide. Lorcan noted in our exchange that it is a pity that these reviews are not Web addressable in and of themselves. Making them so (and I gather there is movement in that direction) is important in several respects. They are first class objects, discrete intellectual content, and without addressable identity, authors cannot as easily claim (or be held accountable for) their efforts. This weakens the incentives for such contributions, and hence the fabric of bibliography. In the absence of a strong corpus of such supporting materials, it is hard to imagine that our community can offer the value that, for example, Amazon does, with its reviews.

The second reason for doing this is to enrich the linking structure of library data. Linking is the currency of attention, and attention is the essence of success on the Web. If we are to “Weave Libraries into the Web” then it must be, in part, through ever-richer linkages among the intellectual products that we create and those we curate. Reviews in Open WorldCat must be harvestable themselves and associated with their referents by links, not just web-page concordance. 

The above argument is a long winded way of sneaking my latest book review into my blog. By embodying harvestable links, it will, in a modest way, strengthen the fabric of bibliography. I’ll put it into OWC as well… the competition isn’t so tough for this one.

Preservation Nightmares: Fire, Flood, File Formats, and Corporate Standards Manuals

I wrote in an earlier post about the second meeting of the Digital Futures Alliance, a cross-industry group hosted by the University of Washington Libraries. The discussion group I participated in was charged with looking at technological dimensions of the problem. Notes from our group expose the conflicting incentive structures embedded in the problem.

The news is peppered with stories of the impact of digital artifacts on lawsuits and law enforcement, so corporations naturally adopt a pre-emptive data destruction policy – email in particular is destroyed in 6 months or a year, unless a user takes active (and possibly surreptitious) steps to self-archive it. Our employers can hardly be blamed for such purposeful forgetting – the burden of  complying with data-fishing expeditions in civil suits alone can be debilitating, and virtually no modern scandal is without its smoking email.  Email is toxic.

Cathy Marshall of Microsoft Research spoke at OCLC not long ago, and her studies of users suggested that little in the way of policy is required to assure the unintended loss of much of our personal digital effluvia. We tend to be poor curators or our own digital assets (alert the media!). It is wry commentary indeed that Cathy’s own strategy for saving her most valued archival materials (her email) is print-and-shelve. Never mind the issue of who it ‘belongs’ to.

Changing all of this will be horrendously difficult, not least because the incentives conflict. Companies want to forget according to a legal timeline; individuals want to preserve, but usually not until its too late. And of course, there are many different varieties of data to capture or not, and myriad formats to fret about. It is hard to know  the greatest threat: flood, fire, file formats, or corporate standards manuals.

Among the most promising ideas at our DFA table was making the case for the beneficial but perhaps unanticipated side effects of data in business processes. Not a new notion, of course… it is everywhere evident in interesting Web applications and businesses. Businesses add value by harnessing data in one part of their business and putting it to work in a new way. My colleagues Lorcan Dempsey, Brian Lavoie, and Lynn Connaway at OCLC have recently written about this in a piece in Library Journal, Making Data Work Harder, suggesting ways that libraries are doing such, and can do more, so as to more effectively expose value in library data.

Similar arguments can be brought to bear on preservation issues, and will probably have to be if there is to be progress in the state of preservation of digital resources.  In the absence of here-and-now economic arguments, it is an uphill struggle.  Some of the ideas that emerged in our DFA discussion group:

• Better automation within the suite of common tools that information workers use
• Making the here-and-now easier (or cheaper) by saving the user time or effort
• Standardizing backup and restoration regimens
• Recognition of the range of complexity of data and its uses, and finding leverage points that add the most value.
• Identify winners and losers – case studies that raise awareness of the costs and benefits of preservation… and preservation failures.

As for corporate email… hide it or lose it is probably the best model for the foreseeable future.  Unless its embarrassing... then it will persist forever, of course.