On 1/28/16, 08:23, "Dave Crocker" <dhc@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >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. I’m curious what our goals are. Are we trying to preserve the historical record of this august body, or capture as complete a record as possible of our meaningful accumulated professional knowledge, or something else? There are not many fields who try to preserve an accurate historical record. (Meaning that I can’t think of one - even museum curators are not required to curate their own working notes.) My understanding is that historians expect both losses and obfuscation. Governments are both obsessive hoarders of decision making documents and distorters of the historical record. If we’re preserving the knowledge, it’s not clear to me that museum quality is required. The process of doing work and being cited seems to provide a natural winnowing and rating process. I know I’ve sent e-mails to this list that have not contributed to the progress of this field, and I believe they’ve mostly been forgotten. To the extent that anything in our modern world is. > > >>> 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. Yeah, and I seem to recall some kind of rathole/vortex around what the original intent of I-Ds was vs. what they are today. I’ll stipulate the position above rather than head anywhere near that. > >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. Future networking researchers or future historians? -- Ted Faber <theodore.v.faber@xxxxxxxx> Engineering Specialist Computer Systems Research Department 310-336-7373