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David Rosenthal discusses the last 25 years of digital preservation efforts in regards to academic journals. It's a long-standing problem and discontinued journals continue to disappear from the Internet. Paper, microfilm, and microfiche are slow to degrade and are decentralized and distributed. Digital media are quick to disappear and the digital publications are usually only in a single physical place leading to single point of failure. It takes continuous, unbroken effort and money to keep digital publications accessible even if only one person or institution wishes to retain acccess. He goes into the last few decades of academic publishing and how we got here and then brings up 4 points abuot preservation, especially in regards to Open Access publishing.
Lesson 1: libraries won't pay enough to preserve even subscription content, let alone open-access content.
[...] Lesson 2: No-one, not even librarians, knows where most of the at-risk open-access journals are.
[...] Lesson 3: The production preservation pipeline must be completely automated.
[...] Lesson 4: Don't make the best be the enemy of the good. I.e. get as much as possible with the available funds, don't expect to get everything.
He posits that focus should be on the preservation of the individual articles, not the journals as units.
Previously:
(2020) Internet Archive Files Answer and Affirmative Defenses to Publisher Copyright Infringement Lawsuit
(2018) Vint Cerf: Internet is Losing its Memory
(2014) The Importance of Information Preservation
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday September 22 2020, @02:39AM
I was a variable data specialist for a while. Been out of the print industry a few years now, but one of the ways I used to add stuff to PDFs was to put one in another [word|quark|indesign] document as a full page image, add text boxes or pics as required, then print that to the PDF driver (Acrobat Distiller) to make a new PDF incorporating the new elements.
Seems like you could almost automate that. Drop a pdf form in a hot folder, have Office or whatever open a new document and drop it in as the background, paste in a pic of your signature (black text on a transparent background), stop at that point to let you drag/resize the signature, click another custom script button to create the new PDF (called "DocumentName_signed.pdf") and drop it in your signed document output folder. You could even have it open up in a pdf-reader to check it worked.
One job constant is that good employers have low turnover, so opportunities to join good employers are relatively rare.