Space and time. The Times explains DSpace, where digital scholarship survives transient storage norms. A sample:
''Loss'' is propelling the movement. When a grant fizzles, when a professor resigns, retires or just buys a new computer, work can get lost. University libraries hope to preserve this material forever — not exactly a common time span in the digital fast lane, where hardware and software sunset soon after reaching the marketplace. And unlike library stacks or hard drives, DSpace won't run out of storage space.
''Everyone has lost something,'' says Ann Wolpert, director of M.I.T. Libraries, which has designated two full-time librarians to DSpace's dedicated computers. ''We have already lost NASA data, Census data. Early digital work is gone because tapes were corrupted or not maintained properly.''
Driving up here yesterday, my daughter, who teaches in a university, was talking about a related problem: graduate student theses that languish in library stacks, with no inbound pointers that can be found outside the library itself. How big (also worthy and complicated) a project would it be to scan those and put them in a searchable part of the Web? … [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]