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@xxxxxxxx
on behalf of dhc@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.
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.
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.
d/