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in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"

Comments

Re:On file formats and the future

[raddan]

There's hardly any program you used 20 or 30 years ago that you couldn't use today.

That's a little naive. During that time frame, we may have had a primitive x86 architecture, but it was far from being a standard. In the eighties, the computers I used were the TI-99/4A, a Commodore 64, and an aging LSI-11.

I didn't get to use what I'd consider to be "modern" machines—a Mac SE and a Packard Bell 286 (a 12MHz machine with a "Turbo" button that allowed it to crash faster) until the late eighties. While there are indeed emulators for a few of the computers I mention above, finding and running the software on these machines is difficult.

My father recently recovered some data (his dissertation) from 5 1/4" floppy that he had originally saved to 8" disk— fortunately, he thought ahead and moved it to a "modern" format, but— seriously, try to get that 8" floppy drive working with your emulator. It is definitely worth the effort to standardize document formats and storage technologies.