Lockheed Chosen For Electronic Records Archives

TrentL writes "How will we be able to read 1990's email messages in the year 2090? Will GIF files still be accessible in 2105? The US National Archives - tasked with preserving records "for the life of the republic" - has chosen Lockheed Martin to solve exactly this problem. Lockheed was awarded the $308M Electronic Records Archives contract after a year-long design competition. Full Disclosure: I worked on Lockheed's demo team."

Comments

Re:Why not?

[tabkey12]

The specs could easily be lost over a long period of time, and it's very hard to reverse engineer algorithms from scratch (given that in 100 years, newer and more optimal algorithms than, LZW will be used). It's predicted that the only image format that will still be around in 100 years is ppm, simply because it only takes about half an hour to implement from scratch!

IFF-ILBM

[Zobeid]

This example of format obsolescence just popped into my head. Back when Commodore-Amiga was a going concern, the IFF-ILBM graphics format was pretty widely used. It was a nearly universal standard on Amiga.

A fair number of artists and video producers used Amigas. One of Amiga's advantages was that practically all the graphics programs used ILBM format, which meant you could easily feed the output from one application into another, and then into another. It was good, and it wasn't all that many years ago.

Just trying finding a program on Mac OS X or Windows today that can read IFF-ILBM files! Go on, try it! Photoshop, for one, doesn't have a clue about them. The best you can hope is to find some obscure freeware IFF-to-PNG converter that someone has hacked together.

Another example: It's getting harder to find apps that play "tracker module" music, and the programs that are available tend to be awkward and unreliable. Everything went to MP3, and mod music was quickly forgotten.

So if the idea of today's commonplace formats becoming unknown in the future sounds far-fetched at all. . . It's not.

Re:IFF-ILBM

[emd]

And of course, for Windows: http://www.irfanview.com/main_formats.htm

Re:IFF-ILBM

[rubypossum]

Hey, someone else has had this problem too. Fortunately, free software to the rescue. and this plugin works nicely.

This is where the true support for these formats will remain - open source. If you want support, you have the freedom to write it yourself.

Of course, if memory serves me right non-free Paint Shop Pro still has IFF support as well. Hmmm. This page seems to say so. I seem to remember Photoshop having IFF support, but that was 3.0 or 4.0ish many moons ago onna MacOS classic box.

Re:IFF-ILBM

[Anonymous Coward]

> Just trying finding a program on Mac OS X or Windows today that can read IFF-ILBM files! Go on, try it! Photoshop, for one, doesn't have a clue about them.

We'll photoshop supported it for a long time, but since nobody uses IFF anymore Adobe made the IFF fileimport filter optional. All you have to do to use it, is to copy 'IFF Format.8BI' from CD (goodies/optional plugins/) to PS plugins dir, and you're done.

Microfiche

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe it or not alot of companies that have tasked with data retention of 100 years+ have adopted microfiche as their standard for data.You don't need to store any programs or anything just dump all the data out onto microfiche and you have a format that will in theory indefinitly

Re:Google?

[TrentL]

The two companies that were "down selected" to compete in the Analysis & Design phase were Lockheed Martin and Harris Corporation. I don't recall what companies participated in the initial competition...I doubt Google was involved.

Lockheed partners include BearingPoint Inc., McLean VA; Fenestra Technologies Corp., Germantown, MD; FileTek Inc., Rockville, MD; History Associates Inc., Rockville, MD; EDS Corp., Plano, TX; Image Fortress Corp., Westford, MA; Metier Ltd., Washington, DC; Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), San Diego, CA; and Tessella Inc., Newton, MA.

Re:Why not?

[drsmithy]

They are now some plastic in plastic. These CDs/DVDs will last less than 10 years (and probably closer to 5).

Even that's pretty generous IMHO. In my experience, recent blank CDs (and DVDs) are lucky to make out 18 months, and many of mine are delaminating or corroding after only 12. I've now gotten into the habit of burning two copies of everything I "archive", and re-burning them every 12 months. Thus far I've had errors, but never errors in the same place on each copy.

Contrast this to the good old "Kodak Gold" CDs I was burning onto back in 1996, almost all of which are still readable with 0% errors...

Walt named names...

[Anonymous Coward]

Walt's testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 24 October, 1947

Saving data for THOUSANDS of years

[Artifice_Eternity]

Check out the micro-etched data disks used by the Rosetta Project. Their goal is to create a long-lasting archive of the basic elements of 1,000 different languages. The storage medium they're using involves etching readable words on to metal disks. The words are not readable by the naked eye, but all you need to read them is a decent optical microscope -- no special hardware or software.

The Rosetta Project's customized "Rosetta Disk" adds another clever innovation: naked-eye-readable words around the edge of the disk get smaller as they spiral inward, making it clear to anyone who might find this disk in the future that there is more information to be read at greater magnifications.

Rosetta Project

[moosesocks]

Many /.-ers would be interested in the Rosetta Project which aims to preserve many world languages using an extremely failsafe medium. defintiely a cool read -- check it out.

sure, it may not be terribly convenient, but it's certainly going to be readable 100 to 1000 years from now (by which point we should have adequate OCR to complete the task of reading the disc automatically)