I am interested in starting an interest group to establish the best methods for preserving multimedia and interactive / dynamic data and scholarly works.
Effectively archiving data is a critical part of creating and sharing information. Archivbing "print" documents (government files, scholarly articles, books, etc), and digitizing textual information for preservation and cross-reference use is important. However, archiving multimedia projects and projects that are not fixed but dynamic in nature is an increasingly important task faced by scholars and librarians. How do we archive a scholarly work that, at its base, is an interactive website or other form of dynamic interactive project? How should the software and even hardware needed to access and interact with and utilize dynamic projects be preserved in relation to the project? Librarians at Stanford University (LOCKSS) and other institutions are starting to address the issue. However, questions about resources needed, accessibility, best practices, and the blurred lines between archiving and hosting inherent in archiving multimedia data are far from settled.
I hope to encourage a discussion, and eventually a working group, toward exploring these issues and comming up with useable solutions for librarians and scholars.