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in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"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