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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in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"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.
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.
Actually, I don't think garbage is the problem. I don't think there is a problem as it's being presented to us. Lots of printed media is destroyed also. Just the other day I found pieces of a five hundred page story I wrote a long time ago, then lost the disk. I'm not going to type it in again, so I just discarded it. It's not the first time in history and won't be the last. Very little of what is written is ever published. Most of it is discarded by our relatives after we die.
I think the real issue is that some people feel a need to collect everything that's ever created, like digital horders. If a tax return is old enough to be on floppy, then you don't need it anymore and any critical information from it probably exists somewhere else.
Content with real value self-perpetuates and remains and while some value is lost through attrition, such as websites going down, the consequences are often miniscule in comparison to the concept of archiving everything permanently.
Maybe we do lose those digital pictures on the floppy (and the box of floppies it was stored in) but if it was critical, we'd do something about it. We might print it out, but we lose albums too. They get wet, mouldy and burned, and we lose those memories too.
Too often it's not that important to us to keep until we want it later and can't find it.
Like most things horded, the value lies in keeping good care of what is most important to us, and often we find that what we want to keep is just a reflection of what matters the most.
To quote an interesting book entry I once read: Perspective. Use it or lose it.
That goes for hording digital stuff too.
GrpA.
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?