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

Chick and Egg problem

[Manip]

This has a fundamental chicken and egg problem: So you store the information, you also need to store the format of that information. So then how do you read "format of the information" document? What format is *that* in?

You see; whatever format you used for anything has to be documented and you can't use paper because it won't last as long ... Do you carve it into stone?

Worse still you need some computer science grads to write up exactly the format down to how long a char is and the bit/byte order. It is a extremely difficult task even if you don't take into consideration finding a storage medium that will last that long. :-(

Google?

[dustinbarbour]

Did Google compete for this contract? They're the ones with the largest infrastructure for such a project and the brains to give us a really slick interface to it all. Not to mention that they could probably have faster response times than archive.org which totally fuckin' blows.