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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in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"
There have been instances when the metallurgy of times past was remarkably superior in some respects to later arts. Think of Damascus steel or Chinese bell-casting. Though the general trend of technology is constant progress forward, in certain cases the ancients were able to teach us a thing or two.
Words: 50 Swears: 9 Facts: 1 (It's an open standard) Relevant Points: 0 You're a little light on the swears section for typical interweb poasts.
I dare say that if I gave an English-speaking computer geek who had never heard of EBCDIC a long document encoded as EBCDIC, and told him (truthfully) that it consisted mostly of English text, he'd have most of EBCDIC reverse-engineered within a few days.
!nothingofvaluewaslost means that they disagree with the tag nothingofvaluewaslost. The '!' is a negation. gb2/digg
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The best example I can think of are personal letters. Usually we judge these by the importance of the person who wrote them, but in some cases we can (today) look at the letters written by ordinary people to their loved ones and gain great historical insight into the events of the time. Take, for example, Ken Burns' "The Civil War". Some of the most compelling information in the documentary was found in the letters written by ordinary soldiers.
Somehow I doubt we'll have records of the emails today's soldiers are sending home 150 years from now.
We can't judge what future generations are going to find valuable in the mountains of data we're generating today. We should find a way to preserve as much of it as we can. I hope someone is working on good, open compression algorithms to go along with the data storage.