DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons and the Mellon Foundation think so as described in a new collaborative initiative called “DuraSpace.”

Professor Steve Wicker, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, pointed out during a recent lecture that lots of data is not only collected about us over the Internet, but also because we use public utilities like phone and electrical services. Stack that up with the fact that many web users, especially young ones, are tripping over themselves to give away even more personal information in exchange for the chance to chat, network or find a date and personal privacy begins to look like an artifact of a bygone age. There’s a whole lotta data out there about us. No one asked me. Did you sign anything?

In giving her best-of-conference paper, From Writing and Analysis to the Repository: Taking the Scholars’ Perspective in Scholarly Archiving, at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in this summer, Catherine Marshall, Microsoft Research, flashed a slide of a very large and unwieldy-looking dust bunny suggesting that it was a good visual metaphor for scholars’ casual attitudes towards digital preservation.

Digital content can be seen from both macro (aggregations of collections) and micro (focused collections) perspectives. In my work as communications director for Fedora Commons and the National Science Digital Library I will post news, notes, and images on these pages from somewhere in between these two vantage points.