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Re: long-term archiving

2016-01-28 13:50:42
On 1/28/16, 08:23, "Dave Crocker" <dhc(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:

Ted,


On 1/28/2016 7:22 AM, Theodore V Faber wrote:
On 1/28/16, 05:31, "ietf on behalf of Dave Crocker"
<ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
on behalf of dhc(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:

That's good, but not sufficient.  That series is a tiny fraction of the
material that should be preserved according to museum-quality
standards.

Museum quality is a pretty high bar.

Indeed it is, which is why I've been careful to label the task so
specifically.


I would prefer that the IETF
preserve materials to the extent we need to do our work, and let
historians and curators decide what (if anything) is worth preserving at
higher quality and reliability.

Essentially, that reduces to requiring that future researchers act now
to preserve ephemeral IETF materials that they might wind up needing.

That, of course, isn't going to happen.

I’m curious what our goals are.  Are we trying to preserve the historical
record of this august body, or capture as complete a record as possible of
our meaningful accumulated professional knowledge, or something else?

There are not many fields who try to preserve an accurate historical
record.  (Meaning that I can’t think of one - even museum curators are not
required to curate their own working notes.)

My understanding is that historians expect both losses and obfuscation.
Governments are both obsessive hoarders of decision making documents and
distorters of the historical record.

If we’re preserving the knowledge, it’s not clear to me that museum
quality is required.  The process of doing work and being cited seems to
provide a natural winnowing and rating process.  I know I’ve sent e-mails
to this list that have not contributed to the progress of this field, and
I believe they’ve mostly been forgotten.  To the extent that anything in
our modern world is.



The IETF community produces very large quantities of other material,
including Internet Drafts, mailing list messages, and web pages.

It seems to me that I-Ds are an interesting case.  They are a series of
documents whose stated purpose is to be ephemeral in order to promote
exchange of half-formed ideas.  Preserving them for the ages seems to
undermine that intent.

The confusion on this is mixing 'status' with 'availability'.  The fact
that a document is no longer considered active does not mean that it
should become inaccessible.

And indeed, that's the reason I-Ds remain available after the time out.

Yeah, and I seem to recall some kind of rathole/vortex around what the
original intent of I-Ds was vs. what they are today.  I’ll stipulate the
position above rather than head anywhere near that.


The same point should apply to all public IETF materials, IMO.

The materials are likely to become useful to future researchers.  But we
cannot expect current researchers to do the archival work now, in
anticipation of those needs.  The responsibility for helping those folk
in the future lies with the IETF community itself, now.

Future networking researchers or future historians?

-- 
Ted Faber <theodore(_dot_)v(_dot_)faber(_at_)aero(_dot_)org>
Engineering Specialist
Computer Systems Research Department
310-336-7373




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