News

A one-day symposium hosted by the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access will be webcast live to participants who are unable to attend the event, which was quickly oversubscribed when it was announced in early February.

The one-day symposium, called “A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information”, will be held April 1, 2010 at The Fairmont in Washington, D.C., convening a diverse group of speakers from the academic, private, and public sectors to discuss one of the most pressing issues of the Information Age: identifying practical solutions to the economic challenges of preserving today’s deluge of digital data.

Those interested in seeing live presentations and discussions from Blue Ribbon Task Force symposium can register online at  http://brtf.vidizmo.com  to view a non-interactive webcast that begins at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time. An agenda of the day’s presentations will be posted to facilitate selective viewing. The webcast is being hosted by Microsoft using VIDIZMO.com, an online video Mashup technology to create, manage, and deliver live or on-demand interactive rich media presentations. Following the symposium, the webcast will be available on demand via VIDIZMO, a Microsoft Gold verified partner, by accessing a link from the Blue Ribbon Task Force website.

“The response to the symposium has been extraordinary – we filled all the seats in just a few days, so we wanted to both webcast the Conversations and provide video after the symposium on the Task Force website to share the information with the widest possible audience,” said Francine Berman, vice president for research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and co-chair of the Task Force. Berman was director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego from 2001 until 2009.

Scheduled to speak at the symposium is a spectrum of national leaders from the Executive Office of the President, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Smithsonian Museum, Nature Magazine, Google, and other organizations for whom digital information is fundamental for success. A full list of participants and a preliminary agenda can be found online.

The symposium will also provide a forum for discussion of the recommendations in the Blue Ribbon Task Force’s Final Report on economically sustainable digital preservation practices, which was issued in late February. The report is available online at the Blue Ribbon Task Force website .

About the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access
The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access was formed in late 2007 to explore one of the most urgent issues of the Information Age:  identifying economically sustainable solutions to the challenges of preserving the ever-growing amount of digitally based data. The Task Force is funded by the National Science Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with the Library of Congress, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the United Kingdom (JISC), the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and supported by Task Force member institutions.

Media contact:
Jan Zverina, 858 534-5111 or jzverina@sdsc.edu 

Event contact:
Susan Rathbun, 858 534-8321 or susan@.sdsc.edu