Researcher Warns of "Digital Dark Age"

alphadogg writes "A assistant professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is sounding a warning that companies, the government and researchers need to come up with a plan for preserving our increasingly digitized data in light of shifting document management and other software platforms (think WordPerfect and floppy disks). Jerome P. McDonough, who teaches at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says there exists about 369 exabytes worth of data, and that includes some pretty hard to replace stuff, including tax files, email and photos. Open standards could play a key role in any preservation effort, he says. 'If we can't keep today's information alive for future generations, we will lose a lot of our culture,' McDonough said. Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"

Comments

So what?

[frank_adrian314159]

How many records do we have from ancient Assyrians? From the Egyptians? Romans? British Empire?

Entropy and loss happens. Most of the data deserves to be lost. How much do I care that Asuk the Assyrian was assessed two goats in taxes? Not a hell of a lot. How much will someone five years from now care about this post? About as much.

We work and write and live for today. That anything travels down the road of time intact is a miracle. What gets carried along is random. This is part of life. Get over it.