Preserving the Past
In Roy Rosenzweig’s Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era, he raises many thought provoking issues about digital archiving. I think the entire article can be summarized by his statement that “historians ignore the future of digital data at their own peril.”
He points out that “linking directly from footnotes to electronic texts–an exciting prospect for scholars–will only be possible if a stable archiving system emerges.” It is scary to think that what we take for granted today might not be available 10 years from now just because technology will continue to grow.
This particularly hit home to me when he mentioned the word processing programs of the ’80s and obsolete storage devices. I took WordPerfect in my former scholastic life. Do my fellow students today have any idea what WordPerfect means? I seriously doubt it (not that forgetting WordPerfect is a bad thing…Lord knows, I try to forget it!). I also still have (though I have no earthly idea why) boxes of floppys and disks that are obsolete and unreadable because there is no way of inserting them into a computer, let alone reading the information on them even if you could figure out how to load them on the computer.
Even Word documents can fall into this black whole zone. With each new release of Microsoft Office, an older version becomes obsolete. What happens to those Word documents I created ten years ago? Even if I managed to keep them on a storage device that my computer can read, can I still even open those documents? That’s a scary thought. It often takes years to research a topic before one can begin to write a paper. It then often takes years to get that paper published. What happens to all those notes that were written 10 years ago? Will an historian be able to access those notes if he or she is asked to update his or her paper? It is truly sobering to consider.
Added to this problem is that the average person could dutifully be backing up to hard drives, flash-drives, and sky-drives all for naught! Will those drives be accessible 10 or 20 years from now? Should we also print out all our information and store it in file boxes in the attic?
I have to admit that I hadn’t really thought of all those issues he raised. But I’m thinking about them now. Hopefully, others are too. Or we are all out of luck.
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