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in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"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

[CRCulver]

In 100 years, I won't care.

Well, with technology progressing the way it is, maybe there's some small hope that we will soon see the possibilities that Ray Kurzweil foretells in his works like The Singularity is Near . One would think that the chance that the younger generations will have indefinitely longer lifespans would encourage more people to think of long-term consequences.

Re:Which is why OOXML is the devil

[Antique Geekmeister]

Try '10 minutes'. That format is simply not stable.

Re:not to worry....

[oldhack]

Dude, you are one sorry dumb ass. All that bullshit is long after I'm dead. Long after your sorry ass is dead.

Dumb ass.