[Taxacom] Centrally supported electronic archive
P. Bryan Heidorn
pheidorn at illinois.edu
Sat May 23 21:47:16 CDT 2009
Not like GenBank but the DSpace / Fedora -- DuraSpace Cloud is an
option.
Maintain multiple active instances including copies on compute clouds
that provide expandable computation and backup. The private and
uncertain nature of any cloud instance is balanced against multiple
copies in multiple architectures. The network is NOT maintained for
taxonomic material but for all digital material so risk and costs are
spread over a much larger community of mostly library types. The
collaborative should survive non-global collapse of a civilization
but not global collapse.
If we wish to make sure taxonomic literature survives a dark ages or
near total global collapse like the last one we would need to make
sure taxonomic materials is tied to other materials. Materials that
the digital equivalents of celtic monks would want to preserve in
their monasteries. In this case we would hope digital monasteries.
It would be nice to have the kind of government support that is
provided GenBank but the preservation model is not necessarily better
except that it is tied directly to human health. So, the e-monks
would be most interested in preserving it during a dark age (as long
as it was not against their religion if because, for example,
genomics caused the dark age). The funding model for GenBank now only
goes to 2016 and then rely on repositories like.. DSpace which alone
are no guarantee. So, taxonomy should piggy-back on much larger
repository initiatives
But we should remember that most paper and knowledge did not make it
though the dark ages. Paper with few copies can not survive many
hundreds of years and is not a good archival format unless monks are
busy making fresh copies.
-- Bryan
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------
P. Bryan Heidorn
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
pheidorn at illinois.edu
http://www.uiuc.edu/goto/heidorn
On May 23, 2009, at 8:41 PM, Karen Wilson wrote:
> A centrally supported archive (or set of mirrored archives) like
> Genbank would be ideal, Doug.
>
> Question is: how do we achieve that?
> I don't know how Genbank got started, but I'm sure others on
> TAXACOM will know. Is it a model we could follow? And what about
> central archives in other disciplines such as physics and astronomy?
>
> Regards
> Karen W
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
> ______________________________________________________________________
> ______________________________
> Karen L. Wilson, AM | Special Botanist Plant Diversity Section
> | National Herbarium of NSW | Botanic Gardens Trust | Royal
> Botanic Gardens Sydney, Mrs Macquaries Road, SYDNEY NSW 2000,
> AUSTRALIA Adjunct Assoc Prof University of New England Secretary-
> General XVIII IBC Organising Committee - July 2011
> Phone: +61 2 9231 8137 | Fax: +61 2 9251 7231 | email:
> karen.wilson at rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au | website: www.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au
>
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:taxacom-
> bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Doug Yanega
> Sent: Saturday, 23 May 2009 3:16 PM
> To: TAXACOM at MAILMAN.NHM.KU.EDU
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] ICZN position on Darwinius
>
> Geoff Read wrote:
>
>> PS. On reading some of the blogging, some by list members, I see
>> blithe
>> talk suggesting the publisher start altering the original as a
>> realistic
>> solution. Wow! Slippery slope! What if it's done in a less high
>> profile
>> situations? How do we know? How do we prove it? And yet another
>> checking
>> task for careful taxonomists.
>>
>> An illustration of a severe problem with electronic pub, IMO. But
>> maybe
>> I'm too untrusting.
>
> If this approach seems untrustworthy, maybe that's because it IS
> untrustworthy - meaning we need to find a better way. Though I'm
> certain to sound like the proverbial broken record, there IS a
> straightforward way to ensure that any digital documents the
> taxonomic community might rely upon *are* an authoritative, original
> version.
>
> ARCHIVE THEM IMMEDIATELY IN A PERMANENTLY-SUPPORTED CENTRAL
> REPOSITORY LIKE GENBANK.
>
> Once again, if we allow anyone to "archive" their own digital
> documents, then we guarantee the entire taxonomic enterprise will
> fail. Half-measures will, I truly believe, be ultimately worthless.
>
> Which do you think will still be readily available to the scientific
> community in, say, 300 years? The digital versions of sequence data
> in Genbank, or the *print* versions? OH, wait...Genbank sequence data
> doesn't HAVE print versions. Are the folks at Genbank insane? I think
> not. In fact, maybe we could learn something really important from
> their example...
>
> Sincerely,
> --
>
> Doug Yanega Dept. of Entomology Entomology Research
> Museum
> Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314 skype: dyanega
> phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not
> UCR's)
> http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
> "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
> is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
>
>
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