Dan Gillmor: Saving Our Digital Heritage

[A longtime participant in the tech and media worlds, Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurshipat Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication.]

They're trying to save the news. Among other things.

No, this isn't yet another thumb-sucking cogitation about the future of journalism, at least not the kind we typically see these days. Rather, this is about a different issue: How do we save journalism (and other media) that's already been created -- including the all too ephemeral information that we're creating online?

This week in Washington, DC, the Library of Congress is gathering its"Digital Preservation Partners" for a three-day session -- one of a number of such meetings the library has been holding under a broad initiative called the"National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program." Its multi-year mission is:

to develop a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations....