Saving Digital History

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.

Comments

one persons trash...

[trefoil]

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..

skip slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to add slashdot as one of the website. They keep reposting stories here as an initiative to preserve their own history.

New Media Doesn't Last

[spun]

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.

Re:New Media Doesn't Last

[Xzzy]

> There are plenty of books that last hundreds of
> years if kept in appropriate conditions.

My suspicion is that punch cards will make a return at some point. ;) No, really. Not only does it resolve the longevity issue, but it could also solve the issue of obsolete reading hardware (seems to me it'd be easier for a distant generation to rig up a punch card reader than a cd-rom drive). Punch cards are in a rather obvious format as well, if worst came to worst and humanity nuked itself back to the stone age.. in ten thousand years a disc that looks like a mirror is probably harder to translate than a piece of paper with regularily spaced holes.

I think the only difference will end up being the material used; how many centuries could a stainless steel plate with pin sized holes last in a library's basement?

Re:New Media Doesn't Last

[Mostly a lurker]

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.

Re:New Media Doesn't Last

[JustaGiga]

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

WaybackMachine

[ChunKing]

Isn't this already being done by the WaybackMachine (http://www.waybackmachine.org)?

That's good.

[Black Parrot]

I deleted all my porn, and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get it again when I need it.

Something Old, Something New

[SparklesMalone]

How much energy should humanity spend remembering its past? I love history, but frankly I'd rather they fund more discoveries (i.e. NASA) than archive drivel like my slashdot musings.

Preservation vs DRM

[dpilot]

Since the public domain died back in the 1920's, and since this is about digital content, it stands to reason that pretty much all of the content that LOC is talking of preserving will be covered by some sort of copyright, and an increasing portion will be protected by some sort of DRM. What will the LOC stand be on this?

Since the LOC seems to hold some of the strings over implementation of the DMCA, they can obviously craft a loophole for themselves. But it will be interesting to see what that loophole is, and how it will work. Will they simply leave the stuff under DRM, and have their own copy of keys, or will they manage to have an unprotected copy?

Enquiring minds want to know.