Briefs

IEEE Spectrum, By MacKenzie Smith

It took two centuries to fill the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., with more than 29 million books and periodicals, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 57 million manuscripts. Today it takes about 15 minutes for the world to churn out an equivalent amount of new digital information. It does so about 100 times every day, for a grand total of five exabytes annually. That's an amount equal to all the words ever spoken by humans, according to Roy Williams, who heads the Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena.

...

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, in Cambridge, where I am associate director for technology, we are attacking the problem of maintaining and sharing digital content over the long haul with a project called DSpace, which we embarked on with Hewlett-Packard Co., in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2000. For this digital repository we have built a simple, open-source software application that not only accepts digital materials and makes them available on the Web but also puts them into a data-management regime that helps to preserve them for generations to come.

Here is the rest of the story.