Slashdot Mirror
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in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"
"I often ask, 'Everyone in the audience who thinks they're going to be using the same word processor in ten years, raise your hand.' No hands go up. 'Everyone who has data around that's going to have value in ten years?' After a minute's thought, every hand goes up. The lesson is clear: information outlives technology."
- Tim Bray
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
The cultural loss isn't something that should be overlooked, some can bemoan it but the value of culture is that it exists, and that different ones existed in the past. Culture changes from moment to moment but without some action the real meat of the early 21st century will be lost forever. That is the big thing here, and that is justification for working for truly readable digital archival methods. There is a project of making minisuce indentations, but that requires a lot of technology to see much less decode. Continuous duplication, by transfer of all old data across all mediums as they rise and fall, by printing content and storing it in climate regulated warehouses, etc. We relish seeing things from thousands of years ago. This is humanity, that is our legacy. We need to leave a legacy for our grandchildren.
The only motivation for a company to invent new ways to preserve data long term is to provide it as a service so they can profit from it. Other than that, a companies main goals are deleting everything it legally can. Anything that no longer exists can't result in a lawsuit.
Everything that is preserved is a potential liability. For items requiring indefinite retention because they are critical to the business... They will be stored, redundant, and backed up appropriately. As the systems that provide those qualities age, they will be replaced in regular maintenance and upgrade schedules as economics and timing come together in the right proportions. In that way, reliability and long-term survivability are maintained - nothing stays on ancient systems that are unmaintainable forever. When systems go out of support, everybody has already been looking to the next solution to migrate to.
So what's wrong with this approach? Its essentially what all "big" companies are currently doing. I don't believe in this proprietary format FUD either - if the proprietary format is no longer supported, you migrate. Potential of future cost to migrate is the only concern, not survivability.
Migration is todays solution to long term storage and I see no reason it should be ignored. Like security, data retention is an ongoing objective that requires maintenance - its not some end-state. Dreaming of a solution that will just last forever seems archaic, no?
Overclockers
OPEN file formats and OPEN hardware, well documented.
Even if no program exists anymore to read your data, as long as you have the specs you can rebuild it. And I mean hard- AND software. If you know how to build it, you can build it provided you have the means. And I'm pretty confident that our future cousins will be able to build a current computer with their future technology, as long as they know WHAT they should build.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Fortunately not everyone shares your view. The world we live in is the way it is (for better or for worse) because it has historical context. We don't live from one moment to the next wondering where our next meal is going to come from. We plan, we dream, we reflect.
I'm reminded of this story from a few years ago, where a 500 year old Leonardo drawing inspired improvements in mitral valve heart surgery.
This comment is for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real insight or information is purely coincidental.
Amazing as it sounds, I still have very VERY old data that goes as far back as 7th grade when I started using computers. I know of no converter for Professional Write that will convert Professional Write documents into ODF, or even MS Word 97/2000/2003.
The only hope I have is that I can use strings to extract the text elements of the data.
From the article -
âoeIf we canâ(TM)t keep todayâ(TM)s information alive for future generations,â McDonough said, âoewe will lose a lot of our culture.â
Hardly.
Apparently none of our culture is stored in books anymore?
Sure if every piece of data was wiped out the world would lose a lot of information... but a lot of valuable and useful information is still put on paper. I don't think that is our biggest cause for concern.
However I do agree that the world really needs to agree on more open / non-proprietary ways of storing data. Sure, I can open a .wav of Blackadder talking about 'sticking a Christmas tree' somewhere from 1992, but I have a bit of trouble opening .ra (real audio) video files from a few years ago.
And working in government everywhere I go the electronics file storage is just a discordant mess. Anything important we have to print and store hardcopies because our electronic systems are just unreliable.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
And I'm not immune of course, there's a lot of shitty software out there and it's easy to trivialise the value of Custers Revenge or Giana Sisters but remember that historically archivists want to know about tasteless/racist video games or tributes/Mario-ripoffs just like they want to know about 1980s comedy shows and magazines.
This article is saying that libraries and archivists had a blind-spot when it came to software. It took them decades to realise that people expressed themselves artistically in this medium. Archivists didn't know that they should preserve it like we do other media.
I know how easy it is to mock these efforts (Eg, the tag "!nothingofvaluewaslost") but please consider supporting and justifying this digital culture as part of a wider effort to justify software expression.
It's easy to pick out dumb software but closing
Open standards could play a key role in any preservation effort, he says
The way I see it there are two approaches to the problem. The Quixotic fight consisting in changing the world and forcing in a dictatorship of openness regarding file formats, which doesn't solve the problem for the past 50 years of computer history.
Or let a few hundred people around the world worry about file format parsing or, in the worst case, even emulators to do whatever old computers did. In a hundred years from now, you'll have very complete emulators for our modern PCs. Considered that a 1994 PC is quite comparable to a 2008 PC (and presumably a 2015 PC) from an emulation point of view, you know that's a given, and even then, in case there was no such emulator, you know you could find a good such emulator for machines from the 2040s, which themselves would be well emulated by machines from the 2070s, and so on.. that's what we already do. There's hardly any program you used 20 or 30 years ago that you couldn't use today.
You just got troll'd!
Most of the garbage that we have now just isn't worth keeping. The biggest problem is filtering out the junk we have so that we know what is really valuable. That would be things like great music; writing; the origins of software freedom; works of history and biography etc. Then we could store that, but the problem is we mostly store SOX inspired lies for compliance audits. This garbage takes away from any effort to store serious stuff long term. Who could we trust to do the filtering? The govt? (no please don't answer that :-)
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
...the more they stay the same. Here's something I posted back in 2006 about this same issue: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207582&cid=16922754
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Historically, things that have been very uninteresting at the time, have been hugely valuable to researchers later on. We may not care about the countless people talking "crap" on bebo right now, but in a few hundred years it might be a different story. When people can easily analyse all those posts for meaningful psychological profiles that aren't currently understood never mind modelled and easily detected, all of that could tell a lot about our society. Even rubbish tips from thousands of years ago are hugely valuable to paleontologists.
This goes more so, for important government records, etc. Peter Quinn did a great job of explaining that, with his Sovereignty talk.
This is one of those fairly bogus, highly overblown stories that keeps cropping up every so often. A similar one is the supposed shortage of scientists and engineers in the US, which has never existed, and is always supposed to be coming Real Soon Now; in fact, the data to support this claim are always either nonexistent or wrong. (E.g., they compare Indian college graduates with US college graduates, but the Indian degree they're comparing with a U.S. bachelor's is more equivalent to an AA degree in the U.S.)
First off, the concern about incompatibility of physical media was valid 30 years ago, but it's a false analogy to try to apply it to today's situation. Thirty years ago, I had data on a mixture of 8-inch floppies and 9-track tapes. I can't read an 8-inch floppy anymore, and although 9-track tapes still exist, most 9-tracks from that era are no longer readable due to physical deterioration of the media. But that was all in an era when hard disks were expensive, and the internet didn't exist. Today, I have all my data on hard disks of various computers, and I use file synchronization software to keep them all in sync. If one of my hard disks dies, I replace it, and I haven't lost any of my data. (I also have backups on optical media, but I basically never need those.)
There's also the concern about formats. People tend to bring up, for example, the image of rooms full of physically deteriorating 9-track tapes with data from old NASA space probe missions. The formats are often not documented. The thing is, most of our data isn't at all analogous to the raw data from Mariner or Voyager or Viking. Those were unique historical events, and the only way to get more data like the data they collected is by sending another space probe. (People also tend to vastly overestimate the value of scientific raw data. It's extremely uncommon for raw data to be of interest decades later.)
Most of the world's data isn't in some obscure NASA format, it's stored in formats that are used by tons of people, and are extremely well documented. Sorry, but I just don't believe that the knowledge of how to decode Adobe Acrobat format is going to be lost to future generations. Ditto for html, jpeg, and mp3.
Another thing to keep in mind is that nowadays you can emulate old computers with excellent performance. For instance, my first home computer was a TRS-80. I can still run my old TRS-80 games on my linux box, using an emulator. Sure, emulation isn't perfect, and some information may be lost. But the claimed threat of data loss is vastly overblown.
The biggest threat to the preservation of information isn't technological change, it's copyright. The most likely reason that I wouldn't be able to get back an old piece of digital data is that the people who tried to preserve it and put it on the web got sued by the people who own the copyright -- the same people who let it go out of print. The economic incentives are to hold on to your copyrights (because that doesn't cost you any money) and send out DMCA notices to anyone who puts it on the net (because that doesn't cost you any money either), all in the hope that your content will be worth eleven cents fifty years from now. This is exactly what we see happening, for instance, with ROMs for old video games, which you can play in MAME, except that you have to find an illegal source for the data, because the owners of the copyrights aren't willing to sell you a copy.
Find free books.
I do agree that we will see some 'cultural disintegration', but not for the reasons cited in the article (which I, of course did not read). The reasons? New media models that require "monthly access fees" (yes Blizzard, Sony, I'm looking at you), and DRM protected media. Sure, some companies will 'do the right thing' and open their media to the public once they are not actively using it as a revenue source, but they will be in the tiny minority. My kids will probably never be able to dust off the World of Warcraft DVD, insert it into their holo-reader and find out what our generation did for fun. Likewise with the millions of songs that are stored precariously on iPods throughout the world. Once the iPod breaks, and the iTunes servers are switched off for the last time, that music is lost forever to the people who loved it dearly, but were foolish enough to accept a 'limited rights' version of their media. Looking back, we can still enjoy art from the entire history of humanity - cave paintings, books, canvas and sheet music, just to name a few. Apart from the physical disintegration of the medium, little can destroy these expressions of our culture. With our new encoded, protected and limited DRM-riddled media, there will be very little to look back on from an individuals point of view. I expect that organizations will spring up to restore these lost works of art, and efforts will be made to make our current culture accessible in fifty or a hundred years. But where does that leave the young kid who finds the suitcase full of DVD's, or Blue-Ray discs in his attic, left to him by his grandfather? Will he or she be able to take a glimpse into history, in the way that our generation has been able to dust off the old vinyl record player, and reverently remove that piece of vinyl from its weathered cardboard cover, to listen to a crackly rendition of Muddy Water's 'Baby Please Don't Go' I doubt it.
Garbage isn't the problem.. the problem is that we have millions of copies of the same data. Think of the 50gb of video games you may have installed.. 10 million people have the same games as you. Music? Unless you performed it yourself or it's sub-underground, chances are millions of people each have multiple copies of it. The anime you've torrented has 10,000 downloads. .
No, see.. actually I'm just keeping a back up for the RIAA in case they lose their copy. PLus I keep it all transcoded to the next generation formats at no charge. And on top of that it's forward deployed for easy re-distribution without bottlenecking their servers. I even paythe lectric bill on the disks and internet connection. So copies are a good thing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.