DigitalKoans

Anything? You likely have a disaster plan that addresses digital asset issues. The potential problem with a disaster plan is that it can be grounded in assumptions of relative normalcy: the building burns down, a tornado hits, a lower-category hurricane strikes. It may assume severe damage within a confined area and an unimpaired ability of federal, state, and local agencies (as well as relief organizations) to respond. It may assume that workers are not at the disaster site, that they are relatively unaffected if they are, or that they can evacuate and return with relative ease and speed. It may assume that your offsite tape storage or "hot" backup site is far enough away to be unaffected.

What it probably doesn’t assume is the complete devastation of your city or town; widespread Internet, phone, power, and water outages that could last weeks or months; improbable multiple disasters across a wide region surrounding you; the inability of officials at all levels of government to adequately respond to a quickly deepening crisis; the lack of truly workable evacuation plans; depleted gas supplies for a hundred miles in all directions; your evacuated workers being scattered across a multiple-state area in motels, hotels, and the houses of friends and relatives after trips or 20 to 30 hours in massive traffic jams; your institution’s administration being relocated to a hotel in another city; evacuees ending up in new disaster zones and needing to evacuate yet again; and the possibility of more local post-catastrophe catastrophes in short order.

Here’s some thoughts. You may need to have your backups and hot sites in a part of the country that is unlikely to be experiencing a simultaneous catastrophe. This will not be reliable or convenient if physical data transportation is involved. Your latest data could end up in a delivery service depot in your city or town when the event happens. Even if this doesn’t occur, how frequently will you ship out those updates? Daily? Weekly? Another frequency?

Obviously, a remote hot site is better than just backups. But, if hot sites were cheap, we’d all have them.

In terms of backups, how software/hardware-specific are your systems? Will you have to rebuild a complex hardware/software environment to create a live system? Will the components that you need be readily available? Will you have the means to acquire, house, and implement them?

Lots of copies do keep stuff safe, but there have to be lots of copies. Here are two key issues: copyright and will (no doubt there are many more).

You may have a treasure trove of locally produced digital materials, but, if they are under normal copyright arrangements, no one can replicate them. It took considerable resources to create your digital materials. It’s a natural tendency to want to protect them so that they are accessible, but still yours alone. The question to ask yourself is what do I want to prevent users from doing, now and in the future, with these materials? The Creative Commons licences offer options that bar commercial and derivative use, but still provide the freedom to replicate licensed data. True, if you allow replication, you will not really be able to have unified use statistics, but, in the final analysis, what’s more important statistics or digital asset survival? If you allow derivative works, you may find others add value to your work in surprising and novel ways that benefit your users.

However, merely making your digital assets available doesn’t mean that anyone will go to the trouble of replicating or enhancing them. That requires will on the part of others, and they are busy with their own projects. Moreover, they assume that your digital materials will remain available, not disappear forever in the blink of an eye.

It strikes me that digital asset catastrophe planning may call for cooperative effort by libraries, IT centers, and other data-intensive nonprofit organizations. Perhaps by working jointly economic and logistical barriers can be overcome and cost-effective solutions can emerge.

What was new and interesting during the week of 9/26/05?

• "Congress to Legislate File Swapping?"
• "Copyright Lawsuit Challenges Google’s Vision of Digital ‘Library’"
• "Digital Archiving Compliance Report from the UK National Archives"
• "EPrints launches EPrints Services"
• Euro Fedora User Meeting (Multiple postings)
• "A Global Information Commons for Science"
• "Google Print Roundup"
• "Library Juice: Gone or Changed"
• "Library Reference Blogs "
• "More on ‘Middleman’ Rights for Webcasters"
• "New Blogging Handbook"
• "Open Access, Funding Agencies, and Incentives"
• "Rollyo: Roll Your Own Mini Search Engine"
• "Search and Rescue"
• "What’s New in OAI-Compliant Repositories"
• "Wikibooks Takes on Textbook Industry"

Zip files (with adjusted URLs that allow mirroring) for the above publications are available.

• SEPB/SEPW (complete archive; will be updated as SEPB changes)
• OAB/OAW (all files in one subdirectory)

With the exception of the OAW, these publications are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License (the OAW is under version 2 of the license).

Backups and Zip files for the OAB, PACS Review, SEPB/SEPW have been deleted from this site. The normal URLS are all working now.

Access to the PACS Review, SEPB, and SEPW has been restored at their normal URLs:

• http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/pacsrev.html
• http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html
• http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepw.htm

After the evacuation of 2 1/2 million people from the Houston/Galveston area amid massive traffic jams in all directions, severe gas shortages before gas stations went completely dry (there is no gas between here and Dallas), stranded motorists along all major highways, hotels being full as far away as Little Rock and Abilene (forget Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio), Houston was spared the worst of Hurricane Rita as the eye took a last minute turn northeast to the Louisiana border.

It took me 2 1/2 hours to go 10 miles West along alt 90, barely moving and consuming a quarter tank of gas before I turned back (it took 15 minutes to return). (Lesson learned: smaller evacuation routes cross bigger ones that, when jammed, overflow so much traffic to the smaller routes that they becomes an impassable barrier, plus officials pay no attention to smaller routes.) Few of the roughly 2 1/2 million people left were on the city streets, and virtually all stores and gas stations were closed and boarded up: a ghost town. After a night of howling winds, but relatively little rain, over 600,000 people have no power, and it may take weeks to restore service (the temperature here before Rita was in the upper 90s). So, no gas, no open stores, no power for many, but residents are thankful, because the scenario of a worst case Category 5 strike included large parts of the coastal region and the Ship Channel being under water, and the rest being hit by 100+ mph winds and over 20 inches of rain (Houston has many bayous and floods easily).

Here are selected links:

• "Hurricane Rita"
• Potential Flooding in Category 5 Hurricane by Zip code (large graphic; 610 loop is the core of the city)
• "Models Show ‘Massive Devastation in Houston’"
• "Mayor White Blasts State’s Handling of Gasoline"
• "Looking for Gasoline? Good Luck"
• "Fear, Kindness Looms around Those Stuck on Interstates"
• "Standed on Empty"
• "State Officials Set Schedule for Evacuee Return"
• "And So the Rush Home Begins"
• "State Sets Staggered Schedule for Return of Rita Evacuees"
• "Outages Could Linger for Weeks"
• "Not All Regret Choice to Flee"
• "Welcome Home"
• Lessons Come at High Cost: 107 Lives
• "Hurricane Season Only Half Over"
• Hurricane Rita Wiki

Roy Tennant has provided mirror sites. Thanks, Roy.

http://roytennant.com/oab/oab.htm

http://roytennant.com/pr/pacsrev.html

http://roytennant.com/sepb/sepb.html

The Public-Access Computer Systems Review could be unavailable for some indefinite period due to Hurricane Rita. However, it allows copying for noncommercial, educational use by academic computer centers, individual scholars, and libraries. It could be mirrored with some URL adjustment if it were done quickly.

Zip file with all journal content

It turns out that the LISHost server is located in Houston, so access to SEPB, SEPW, and the OAB could cease for some indefinite period. However, since all of these publications are under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License, they could be mirrored as long as that occurred quickly.

• SEPB and SEPW in one zip file. No URL editing required.
• OAB. Some URL editing required.

Due to Hurricane Rita, a backup of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography has been made available.