The announcement for First International Workshop on Database Preservation (PresDB'07) has been posted to the relevant mailing lists, so you may have already seen it, but it is worth taking a moment to reflect on the need for this workshop and the relevance to government information and depository libraries.

While considerable thought has been given in the past to the preservation of fixed "digital objects", the preservation of databases, which have an internal structure and which may change over time, poses new challenges. Typically databases are centrally managed, and their survival depends on the viability of commercial organisations or the continued public funding of data centres. Libraries, the traditional curators of scientific and scholarly reference material, have largely abrogated their archival responsibility to databases.