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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in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"
If archeologists find knives and trash to be important in a search, I'd say the average pictures that we are taking today might actually be very intereting to future generations for they represent normal life.
The article talks about two very distinct and different problems--hardware and file formats. The author has a point about the hardware--if the media goes bad or if there is no way to read the data, then the data is lost. However, the author is completely off-base when it comes to file formats...
The author specifically mentions WordPerfect files. Bad example! The default file format in Wordperfect X4 (released in April, 2008) is the same as what was used in WordPerfect 6--which came out in 1993 (DOS and Windows). While I can't speak for OpenOffice or Google Docs, MS-Word can read those files (and WordPerfect 5.x files) with a simple File/Open. Excel opens Lotus 1-2-3 files as well. So, Word can open popular formats in use since 1988 (WP 5.0) and Excel can open some formats in use since 1983 (1-2-3 r1a). You can also buy programs like FileMerlin to convert old documents.
Frankly, when it comes to file formats, conversion apps will exist for a LONG time. For DOS apps, you could even go so far as to create a v/m or use Dosbox, load up your obsolete word processor (I miss "Leading Edge Word Processor"!) and copy/paste the text into Word or Notepad...
Image files, sounds, & videos are no exception... GIF has been around since 1987, JPEG has been around since the early '90s (opening those on a 10Mhz 8088 was slow!), and MPEG/WMV/AVI/Quicktime videos are easily openable...
Finally, the more people that are affected by obsolete files, the more interest there is in some way to convert the data... But don't forget that a LOT of the data is junk--do you really care about your 7th grade paper you wrote on Hong Kong in 1989?
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
I'm more concerned about losing the culture from the 20th century.
Everyone born after 1975 hates the RIAA, doesn't pay any attention to whatever they say, and file-shares gigabytes without a thought to the music industry definition of 'piracy'. This is as it should be. It means that the music and movies of the (for now) young people is safe because it is widely circulated outside the control of those who have deluded themselves into believing that they own it.
It's all the stuff from the first 2/3rds of the 20th century that will disappear. Because the people who like it are in their 50's, 60's, and 70's now and don't have the technical skills to copy and distribute it. Plus they actually trust the corporations will preserve it. I mean all the books, music recordings, television shows, movies, and plays from the first half of the 20th century. The stuff that is under 'infinite copyright' and will never be in public domain because the corporations will simply pay off the politicians to endless extend the copyright period, as they do now.
As soon as all this stuff stops selling (and who nowdays is paying money for the book that was #3 on the New York Times BestSeller list of Oct 28, 1936?), and can't be legally copied because it can't enter public domain, then the corporations will just destroy it. Pulp the books; convert the film stock to ethanol to power their SUVs; dump the magazines in the oceans or in nuclear waste sites to absorb neutrons. When that happens, all this culture will be gone and historians 200 years from now will have little idea about how civilized people actually thought and acted in the critical early years of the modern technological age.
You can talk to the old people about the need to preserve their culture by making 'illegal' copies of the books, magazines, and movies that were important to them, but they are just simply and completely clueless about the extent that their culture will die as they do.