An electronic publication with a primary focus on digital library research and development. http://www.dlib.org/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/march2008-editorial "During the internal prepublication review of this month's issue, a colleague asked me why I had categorized the Lavoie piece and Marshall piece as "commentaries" rather than as "articles." I realized that although the D-Lib Magazine guidelines for authors and a June 1999 editorial by William Arms describe the editorial process and our preferences regarding submissions to D-Lib, neither of those documents provides a description of the various types of D-Lib content. Therefore, I hope the following will be helpful to those who wish to contribute content to D-Lib Magazine." Editorial by Bonita Wilson, CNRI. http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/march2008-lavoie "A few years ago my colleague Lorcan Dempsey and I wrote an article entitled "Thirteen Ways of Looking at ... Digital Preservation" [1] (the title being a shameless re-working of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", a well-known poem by Wallace Stevens). Our purpose was to present a more nuanced view of digital preservation than one typically found in the literature, conferences, and community discussion springing up around the topic....The present article focuses on the fifth "blackbird" in our original list of thirteen: digital preservation as an economically sustainable activity. In reviewing the list of blackbirds in the earlier article, the one pertaining to economic sustainability stands out as an area where it seems we can point to little progress. Much of the discussion in the digital preservation community focuses on the problem of ensuring that digital materials survive for future generations. In comparison, however, there has been relatively little discussion of how we can ensure that digital preservation activities survive beyond the current availability of soft-money funding; or the transition from a project's first-generation management to the second; or even how they might be supplied with sufficient resources to get underway at all." Commentary by Brian F. Lavoie, OCLC Online Computer Library Center. http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/march2008-marshall-pt1 "Underlying the technical discussions of digital archiving are two unifying assumptions: (1) preservation will rely on the ability to represent individual digital objects -- academic papers, datasets, multimedia creative works, and so on -- in such a way that they may be decoded and accurately rendered many years hence... and (2) trusted repositories will be used to store and exchange these individual digital objects...But do these two assumptions adequately reflect the problem as it is experienced by consumers who at this point have been using personal computers for one or possibly two decades? Indeed they do not. I will argue that this perspective is a radical (and possibly dangerous) simplification if we actually examine the current technological and social environment along with the kinds of digital materials that consumers have begun to amass." Commentary by Catherine C. Marshall, Microsoft Research. http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/march2008-marshall-pt2 "In Part 1 of this article, I laid out a space of challenges that we must overcome to ensure that we retain our digital assets over time and through changes in computing platforms and digital technologies. When they are set out this way, none of these challenges are surprising. Yet taken together, they suggest a radical revision in the way we approach personal digital archiving, and the types of services, applications, and institutions we put in motion at its behest....In this portion of the article, I explore the implications of the four challenges presented in Part 1 -- (1) accumulation, (2) distribution, (3) digital stewardship, and (4) long-term access -- and discuss (at least in a preliminary, superficial way) some promising technological directions and requirements for each." Commentary by Catherine C. Marshall, Microsoft Research. http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/march2008-smith "Conventional wisdom holds that search engines "prefer" sites that are wide rather than deep, and that having a site index will result in more thorough crawling by the Big Three crawlers -- Google, Yahoo, and MSN. We created a series of live websites, two dot-com sites and two dot-edu sites, that were very wide and very deep. We analyzed the logs of these sites for a full year to see if the conventional wisdom holds true. We noted some interesting site access patterns by Google, Yahoo and MSN crawlers, which we include in this article as GIF animations. We found that each spider exhibited different behavior and crawl persistence. In general, width does appear to be crawled more thoroughly than depth, and providing links on one or two "index" pages improves crawler penetration." Article by Joan A. Smith and Michael L. Nelson, Old Dominion University. http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/march2008-klijn "This article chronicles our journey towards a common way of packaging and exchanging digital content in a future Australian data commons -- a national corpus of research resources that can be shared and re-used. Whatever packaging format is used, it has to handle complex content models and work across multiple submission and dissemination scenarios. It has to do this in a way that maintains a history of the chain of custody of objects over time. At the start of our journey we chose METS extended by PREMIS to do this. We learnt a lot during the first two stages that we want to share with those travelling to a similar destination." Article by Judith Pearce, David Pearson, Megan Williams and Scott Yeadon, National Library of Australia. http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/march2008-mitchell "This article investigates the use of social software applications in digital library environments. It examines the use of blogging software as an interface to digital library content stored in a separate repository. The article begins with a definition of digital library approaches and features, examines ways in which open source and social software applications can serve to fill digital library roles, and presents a case study of the use of blogging software as a public interface to a project called Digital Forsyth, a grant-funded project involving three institutions in Forsyth County, NC. The article concludes with a review of positive and negative outcomes from this approach and makes recommendations for further research." Article by Erik Mitchell and Kevin Gilbertson, Wake Forest University. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march08/03inbrief.html#BRANIN http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march08/03inbrief.html#PANITCH http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march08/03inbrief.html#NICHOLSON