NonprofitEye

Read an exciting article on disaster recovery the other day (I know, I know, proof that I have NO life!)...I came across info on the life expectancy of various digital storage media... average life of a diskette - one year, average life of a CD - ten years - average life of magnetic tape - tops 50 years. All of these involved storage in ideal conditions (temperature controlled, stored vertically, dust free, etc. Since the advent of the digital age, more and more knowledge is stored electronically, often with no physical counterpart. We take photos with digital cameras, save them on unbacked up hard drives or worse still leave them on the tiny cards that come with our cameras. We write novels and store them on flash drives. We leave these flash drives dangling from our key chains or stuffed in our backpacks. By way of example, a friend stored all the family photos on a server and in the time it takes to say "power surge" they were gone. No more baby pics. His wife learned ...

Ask And Ye Shall Receive: Error 404 File Not Found by Pam Ashlund Before my fingers had left the keys...my prayers were answered. If only I could tag a webpage and know it would still be there when I returned! While I've been tagging used Del.icio.us for a few weeks, I came across another service: Ma.gnolia. I finally got around to importing my bookmarks to Mag. today and was just browsing around, reading the FAQ files, and what did I find? This: When you add a bookmark to Ma.gnolia, we rush around in the background to save a copy of that web page for your future viewing. Never again will you be lost if a web page moves or gets deleted. Ma.gnolia's saved copies have got you covered, so that what you find stays found. Would I be pushing my metaphor if I said 'I was lost but now I'm found'? Okay, okay...so how did Ma.gnolia handle the legal/ethical dilemma? How does Ma.gnolia treat controlled content when making saved copies? Ma.gnolia only makes a saved cop...

The Temporality of Digital Knowledge by Pam Ashlund The nonprofit community has a wealth of information online. Advice from Fundraising to Finance. Whitepapers, ToolKits, Articles. A collective knowledge that could never be found in one book (or ten books for that matter). What worries me is that the owners of each piece of this databank have no commitment, responsibility nor mandate to leave this information on line. When a website closes, the data goes with it. When a newspaper archives its free material, it is either gone or pay-to-play from that point forward. At the moment this information is all available at a click, but it is not centralized and its very existence is oh so tenuous. As anyone who has bookmarked or tagged a reference URL has discovered, upon returning to the link, the site is no longer there, the article has been moved, or resides behinds a closed door. These broken links are a fact of the electronic age. The ethical dilemma: make sure this data doesn't dissap...