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| Hearsay: |
Between crashes and legacy file formats, there’s a whole host of reasons to be afraid of digital storage. Now imagine you’re the world’s librarians dealing with the only remaining copies of some major texts. Don’t trip over that plug. How do you preserve digital texts for future technologies that haven’t been invented yet?
“The state of things is that we’re in the digital dark ages right now,” Witt said. “We’re losing a ton of valuable information that is electronic because of the transient nature of the Internet and of storage technology and how people use it.”
Tom Cramer, the associate director of digital library systems and services at Stanford University, said that NASA’s inadvertent discovery — that even machine-produced data can be lost to the environment or obsolescence — echoes his own experience. Closer to home, Stanford’s library was tasked with helping the Monterey Jazz Festival preserve its historical recordings from decades ago. Out of hundreds of tapes taken from nearly 40 years of recording history, Cramer said, only one couldn’t be recovered. But audio from a digital format the festival began using in the 1990s wasn’t as reliable: out of scores of those tapes, covering about six years, six were damaged beyond recovery.
So digital preservation encompasses not only the problem of reliable storage and recovery but of how to finance it, how to manage it and how to make such systems sustainable over the long run. For that to happen, though, enough institutions have to participate. The British report, “Mind the Gap,” found that although a slight majority of respondents in the United Kingdom said they had an institutional commitment to addressing the issue, only 20 percent said there was enough funding to tackle it, a third said there were “clear responsibilities” for handling it, and only 18 percent said there was a strategy for digital preservation at all.
Still, Stanford has been one of the pioneers in developing solutions to digital preservation, especially through its Silicon Valley ties to Sun Microsystems, which last year set up the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group, or PASIG, to bring together leaders in research libraries, universities and the government to periodically meet and collaborate on digital archiving issues.
I was also under the impression that data lost integrity every time it was copied, so that every time a file is moved from one storage space to another, it’s slowly disintegrating. I remember reading something about that long ago. Is that still the case? Do any of my shadowy IT minions know about this? Oh, and people: please pants anyone you hear use the term “cybrarian” in conversation. End communication.
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July 25th, 2008 at 8:49 am
It is true that analogue recordings (cassette tape, wax cylinder, cuneiform) deteriorate that way, but digital recordings, in theory, should not. The analogue way is like making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, ad infinitum, but digital copying just transfers the sequence of zeros and ones that your file consists of.
Thought of that way, though, libraries in the future might only contain two items: zeros and ones. But lots of them.
July 25th, 2008 at 9:49 am
I don’t know about recordings, but I know that, in regard to texts, that’s what XML is for.
The idea behind XML is that it’s not made for a specific platform, so you can generate documents
using any technology or platform. For that reason, documents written in XML will still be readable eayrs from now (at least that’s the idea).
July 25th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Sorry about the weird format (and the “eayrs”).
The text box does a funky thing when I write comments. It becomes so long that it goes off the screen to the right. I couldn’t see part of my comment or the typo.
Guess this Website doesn’t support Explorer 7, hun? Don’t blame you… (writing this with Firefox… now that’s better…)
July 25th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Melanie, my screen does the same thing. It’s ok at home, with firefox.
July 25th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Josh is correct — analog recordings are known to deteriorate upon copy. Digital recordings, although copyable ad infinitum, still rely on physical media for storage. Magnetic media like tapes can deteriorate rapidly, but even optical media (like CDs) have a shelf life. Then again, so does paper. The problems we face now are the problems of multimedia, which can not be contained on a page, and are therefore best stored in digital format (since they can be copied exactly, over and over, from there). Understanding the shelf-life of the media and making copies on to fresh media before the current storage format goes bad is the daunting task now facing new digital libraries. The media shelf-life will get better, and as libraries take the time to understand their archives and what is needed to preserve them, their systems for dealing with archiving and transferring to fresh media will also get better. We are in the early stages of figuring out how to do this right.
July 28th, 2008 at 8:57 am
When it comes to things other than music and film, why not make sure that somebody, somewhere is just printing things out.
Mary