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in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"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

I say

[speedingant]

Lets go back to using basic text editors and floppy disks. Would we REALLY miss the new "XYZ 5000-tron GUI" Microsoft Word?

And who needs to store pictures and movies on their computers anyway? In fact, I think the world would be a better place without them!

Now if you excuse me, I'm going back to watching Iron Man on my wrist watch.

Re:I say

[geekoid]

um..do you have a link to that watch?
And more importantly, a song:
sung to the spiderman tune.

"Iron Man, Iron Man
Does whatever an iron can
Presses pants really fine
Keeps those pleats right in line
Look out! Here comes the Iron Man" - Marvel

Marketing and Management already know!

[CorporateSuit]

We can just store everything in the cloud! Problem solved!

Re:Marketing and Management already know!

[NoobixCube]

In the cloud? Oh my god! What happens when it rains?! The farmers will have all our data! We'll have to sue the farmers for their harvest, since their crops will contain all the data and applications!