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Saving Digital History

Posted by timothy on from the problem-that-keeps-getting-discovered dept.

Gavinsblog writes "The Washington Post is reporting that the Library of Congress in the U.S. plans to initiate the $100 million National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). It is hoped that the project will lead to the preservation of data that is constantly changing on the Internet. But I wonder who will choose what is worth saving?" This may remind you of the LOC's effort to preserve and digitize the audio collection in the National Recording Registry.

4 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. one persons trash... by trefoil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    is another persons treasure.. I'd say just save it all and allow others to sift through and decide what is worthwhile and what is worthless.. just like the library..

  2. New Media Doesn't Last by spun · · Score: 4, Insightful
    It all degrades faster than plain old ink on paper. There are plenty of books that last hundreds of years if kept in appropriate conditions. Film decays pretty rapidly. Tapes don't last, even CDs and DVDs wear out pretty quickly. Gopher is all but gone. Web pages disappear daily.

    The irony is that, while digital files could be preserved indefinitely in absolute perfection, many are being completely lost in much less time than it would take a book to turn to dust.

    Kudos to the folks at the Library of Congress, and other projects like the Wayback Machine who are working to preserve a surprisingly ephemeral media.

    --
    - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    1. Re:New Media Doesn't Last by Mostly+a+lurker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sorry, but this idea will not fly on a number of grounds. Consider how many punch cards would be needed to save even 4.7GB of data (contents of one DVD). It would take over 50,000,000 cards (even if they did not contain sequence numbers). The creation and storage costs would be astronomical and reading them back in to find any data you wanted would take weeks -- just for a single DVDs worth of data. Further, much of the most useful data (images and sound recordings) are more difficult to store on punch cards than almost any other alternative medium.

    2. Re:New Media Doesn't Last by JustaGiga · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not only a concern that physical media may become obsolete, but also the algorithms in which data is encoded on the media. We have lots of old backup media (reel to reel tape, 8mm tapes) at work that are probably still readable, but no one knows how the data was encoded on that media (or more importantly,) what information is on which tape.

      Most commercial tape backup solutions have proprietary encoding solutions, and who knows if that company is going to be in business/supported in 50 years. In fact, for true(r) long-term storage, it's recommended to copy the data from the commercial tape backup solution copy to plain old tar.

      Keeping an archive on media that will be around in 50 years seems like a minor point compared to finding the exact tape with the right data you need in a format you can still decode.

      -JG