and is titled "Digital Amnesia." It highlights the work of the InterPARES research project led by the University of British Columbia's Dr. Luciana Duranti. According to her "the standards resulting from this [first] phase [of InterPARES] are currently being incorporated into laws and policies around the globe."

Actually, that was happening anyway due to the impact of the Internet and the development of electronic commerce which forced governments to legitimize the digital record and electronic signatures. No evidence is presented in the article to back up this claim nor is there any information about this development on the InterPARES 1 or InterPARES 2 Web sites. Some jurisdictions, especially in Europe and Australia, were simultaneously working on the same problem as InterPARES and came up with their own solutions. On the issue of a working model and process for preservation of digital records, InterPARES itself adopted the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model developed under NASA's leadership for the long-term preservation of data associated with the exploration and science of outer space.

The second article, "Data Extinction" by Claire Tristram, appears in the October 2002 issue of MIT's Technology Review. While archives and specific research projects are mentioned, the featured interviewee, Dr. Abby Smith of the Council on Library and Information Resources, relates the issue of digital preservation entirely in terms of libraries as evidenced by the final paragraph:

“People count on libraries to archive human creativity,” Abby Smith says. “It’s important for people to know, though, that libraries are at a loss about how to solve this problem.” When computer users are saving documents or images, they don’t think twice about making them accessible to future generations, she says. “They need to.”

I am at a loss to understand how the work of InterPARES, which is also garnering press space, let alone some of the other research projects undertaken by individual archives around the world such as the Netherlands' Digital Preservation Testbed, did not get mentioned in this article.