Slashdot Mirror
British Library Starts Email Archive
sushi writes "Australian IT is reporting
that 'The British Library is creating an archive to store the emails of the nation's top authors and scientists, as the written word is replaced by electronic messages.' A spokeswoman says it welcomes emails from prominent people in all walks of life.
"We want people with a canon of work behind them," she says. The article also talks of the need to read data from (now) obsolete computing platforms..."
Actually, it turns out that the idea of donating a punch-card reader (parent post) isn't offtopic, if you read the article. They are in fact trying to deal with a gigantic backlog of electronic data from machines from the 1960's which they do not currently have a proper means to decipher--such as the work of Donald Michie, the artificial intelligence pioneer, and World War 2 codebreakers. They have the computer data, and in some cases even the comptuers, but no way to do anything with it. Manuals cannot be found (and having never been officially published, are not easily locatable), and critical hardware is broken or missing.
The problem is more general, it is not only limited to emails.
As digital storage becomes more popular, someday we will lose valuable historical data and information because we will be unable to read the digital code of some device.
If a very big asteroid hits Earth and civilisation returns to its 19th century state, for example, and after some time the future archaelogists try to discover the pre-asteroid history of civilisation, they will have no idea what these chips and CDs and memories are! they will be unable to even think that these things contain information written by humans.
There is a period in human history called "dark ages" (before the middle ages) because the historians know very little about it and we have found nearly no writings from that era. see: http://www.wikinfo.org/wiki.php?title=Dark_Ages