CDs and floppies are iffy as long-term storage solutions, warns an article in today’s New York Times.
That’s old news, but here’s an extra thought in a TeleRead context. Is it possible that a national digital library system could reliably store not just finished books but also the personal papers of leading authors who consented?
Admittedly there are risks. Care would have to be taken to prevent leaks and give the writers and their estates control over the material, just as is the case in the paper era. But the idea is at least worth contemplating.
Possibility for Internet Archive?
Maybe the privately owned Internet Archive could undertake this project–a nice way to complement the work of OurMedia (formerly OpenMedia), which will focus on storing the texts, graphics, audios and videos of ordinary Americans with stories to tell. Other notables, such as leading business people and government officials, might also see possibilities here.
Meanwhile here are more details from the Times article:
The nation’s 115 million home computers are brimming over with personal treasures – millions of photographs, music of every genre, college papers, the great American novel and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages.
Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for the next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the problem of digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the experts.
“To save a digital file for, let’s say, a hundred years is going to take a lot of work,” said Peter Hite, president of Media Management Services, a consulting firm in Houston. “Whereas to take a traditional photograph and just put it in a shoe box doesn’t take any work.” Already, half of all photographs are taken by digital cameras, with most of the shots never leaving a personal computer’s hard drive.
So dire and complex is the challenge of digital preservation in general that the Library of Congress has spent the last several years forming committees and issuing reports on the state of the nation’s preparedness for digital preservation.
Jim Gallagher, director for information technology services at the Library of Congress, said the library, faced with “a deluge of digital information,” had embarked on a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project, with an eye toward creating uniform standards for preserving digital material so that it can be read in the future regardless of the hardware or software being used. The assumption is that machines and software formats in use now will become obsolete sooner rather than later.
“It is a global problem for the biggest governments and the biggest corporations all the way down to individuals,” said Ken Thibodeau, director for the electronic records archives program at the National Archives and Records Administration.
In the meantime, individual PC owners struggle in private. Desk drawers and den closets are filled with obsolete computers, stacks of Zip disks and 3
