Here's a short, informative interview with Vicky Reich, director of the LOCKSS programme at Stanford University Libraries, and Randy Kiefer, executive director of the CLOCKSS archive:

• Digital preservation matters, Research Information (April/May 2012).

Excerpts:

VR: If you don’t preserve digital content then it won’t exist. Most of society’s culture and commercial assets are now digital but, generally, the move from print to electronic is about access rather than preservation....

VR: The web as a publishing platform enables many things never envisaged in the print world. The web started with a document model, then evolved to include dynamic elements, such as advertisements and embedded videos. But first with AJAX and now with HTML5, the web is becoming a networked operating system inside the browser. It is no longer enough to parse content collected from the web to find the links and follow them; the content must be executed to discover the web resources from which it is composed. Some of these resources are web services, such as Google Maps. Preserving executable content and the services on which it depends is a major challenge that the LOCKSS programme is working to address.