Pogue Article from Scientific American

[MikeFromHC]

Originally Posted by Belfaborac

Sure, if someone gave me 60s tape reel I'd have no method accessing the data myself, but I would have no trouble at all finding someone who could and who could transfer the data onto a hard drive or memory stick for me.

If the tapes had been properly cared for and the media itself was of a high quality and thick enough to prevent bleed through of the magnetic fields, then you could.
But a hundred years from now most of that would be gone.

With rare exception only the continuing copying of material to newer storage methods will insure that things last.

[Doug Huffman]

I have three or four cubic feet of tintype and silver images in the garage waiting to be copied. They likely won't be. I was acquainted with Ansel Adams. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

[leebase]

Most books don't last 200 years either. Nor most photos. We'll be better off in the digital age as we can format shift. More data will survive than before, even thoug much will continue to be lost.

Lee

[CazMar]

One of the reasons we don't have a huge amount of writing from the ancient western world (Greece and Rome) is not because they couldn't do "data transfer", i.e. rewriting the texts every few years because papyrus deteriorated, but because political and religious zealots simply decided it wasn't appropriate. I would say that with the digital rendering of many old books they are less likely to disappear now than at any time in history. And if the human race is reduced to a few scattered tribes living in a post-apocalyptic state then the whole book thing is probably going to be the least of their problems....

[toronado]

Originally Posted by CazMar

One of the reasons we don't have a huge amount of writing from the ancient western world (Greece and Rome) is not because they couldn't do "data transfer", i.e. rewriting the texts every few years because papyrus deteriorated, but because political and religious zealots simply decided it wasn't appropriate. I would say that with the digital rendering of many old books they are less likely to disappear now than at any time in history. And if the human race is reduced to a few scattered tribes living in a post-apocalyptic state then the whole book thing is probably going to be the least of their problems....

That is EXACTLY what I was thinking!

While issues such as bleed-through on magnetic tape reels are real, I think it is incorrect to frame the issue of data loss as a technological problem; I see it as purely a human stupidity issue. We have always had the technology to make back-ups and transfer/update to new media, we just fail to use it.

[Belfaborac]

My thoughts exactly. The capability to convert and store things are there; whether it's being done is another matter. NASA didn't lose the aforementioned data because the tech wasnt there to preserve it, it did so through negligence and stupidity. Two things which will remain issues as long as there are people left on the planet.

Excellent point by CazMar too: it it was't for the all-encompassing, intolerant rule of religion after the Roman empire fell, our knowledge of the ancient world would be immeasurably larger. Not to mention that we'd be at least some 4-5 centuries further along in our development.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by CazMar

One of the reasons we don't have a huge amount of writing from the ancient western world (Greece and Rome) is not because they couldn't do "data transfer", i.e. rewriting the texts every few years because papyrus deteriorated, but because political and religious zealots simply decided it wasn't appropriate.

That's not entirely the case, since it was "religious zealots" like Christian monks and Islamic scholars who actually did the work of protecting and re-copying texts -- including a few as disruptive as Satyricon. AFAIK Japan never had an equivalent to Qin Shi Huang, but many cultural writings are still lost.

Books have been lost or destroyed for many reasons, none of which are simple.

Digital has one advantage in that recopying data is relatively easy; Gutenberg's archives might be 1 or 2 TB total, which would be very easy these days to duplicate. Music and movies are currently a bit much, but in 5-10 years you will likely be able to fit digital versions of the world's content in a relatively small container.

However, collecting all that data in one place is not easy, nor is keeping up with all the new content -- e.g. over 270,000 new books were published in 2009 in the US alone (47k fiction, 24k sociology/econ, 13k science). That figure doesn't include newspapers, websites, government reports, academic journals....

And again, the bottom line is you need an intermediary device. So not only do you need to protect the recorded media, you also need to ensure the existence of the dozes, if not hundreds, of intermediary devices. It's not any easy task, and it's already driving archivists up a wall.

[toronado]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

...collecting all that data in one place is not easy...

Nor is it advisable. Single point of failure. One nice thing about the internet is it is distributed and redundant. So too must be the archives.

A while back I heard about an archiving project to convert audio recordings to a (primitive) technology that uses disks that could be played back without electricity. I forgot what that project was called or who was doing it.

Personally, I don't like the idea of preparing for a world without electricity, because that isn't a world I'd want to live in. However, as long as the non-electronic archives are also made available digitally, I'm fine with that.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by MikeFromHC

Aside from sharing the EMF spectrum I don't think TV was an add on to radio (or to X-ray machines and microwaves)

Wrong. A TV signal is simply pictures encoded in radio waves, and a TV receiver is a device to recreate those pictures by decoding the radio waves (until recently, via a big vacuum tube). It is absolutely an add-on to radio.

Our ability to produce vacuum tubes has been essentially lost and we would have to start over again if the need arose.

Wrong. Vacuum tubes are still produced on a regular basis. There are also still entire books of instructions on how to design tubes, not to mention pre-existing designs. It would probably be easier to hire a competent vacuum tube designer than a competent buggy whip maker, let alone a flint knapper.

Old movies were not lost because of their format; they were lost because the film CAUGHT FIRE or FELL APART, or was never saved at all. Let's not even go into what the Time executives did when they bought Warner Brothers. Physical disintegration affects old films, old data tapes ... and old books.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

And again, the bottom line is you need an intermediary device. So not only do you need to protect the recorded media, you also need to ensure the existence of the dozes, if not hundreds, of intermediary devices. It's not any easy task, and it's already driving archivists up a wall.

Or we could keep that data in an open format -- epub, let's say -- and anyone who wants to could read it, because they would have or could build an epub reader from that standard.

[Viseguy]

Digital preservation is a major concern for professional archivists; there's a Library of Congress (U.S.) website devoted to it (www.digitalpreservation.gov). The page on preserving your digital memories is worth a read.

The more digitized the world becomes, the more seriously we have to think about long-term strategies for preserving knowledge stored in digital form so that it can be passed on to future generations.

[kindlekitten]

Originally Posted by Doug Huffman

I have three or four cubic feet of tintype and silver images in the garage waiting to be copied. They likely won't be. I was acquainted with Ansel Adams. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

wow! do you need an assistant?

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Or we could keep that data in an open format -- epub, let's say -- and anyone who wants to could read it, because they would have or could build an epub reader from that standard.

hopefully we learn from our mistakes. I am in the process of converting old family photos into digital records as well as re-copying them into a paper format. how many different formats do we need to feel safe?

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

That said, paper is no guarantee of longevity. Paper can be lost or destroyed, languages can change. I'd be shocked if any book in my collection is actually more than 50 or 60 years old, and I would not be surprised at all if there were tons of pulp novels or sci-fi short stories that are essentially lost forever.

This is a very good point - huge amounts of genealogical and other records have been lost in the US due to courthouse fires. (If it sounds unlikely, try to do research on records usually stored in courthouses - you'll typically go back 60-70 years and find that all previous records were lost in a fire. A bunch of records concerning Viet Nam service members were lost to a fire in the early 70's. There's something risky about storing data on something as flammable as paper, too. (Although things are probably better since we're in the age of non-smoking in public buildings).

[Hatgirl]

Oh Scientific American, you are not the first to have realised this. But rather than just writing an article in which they freak out about the idea of technological advancements, Project Gutenberg actually came up with a solution:

Today, Plain Vanilla ASCII can be read, written, copied and printed by just about every simple text editor on every computer in the world. This has been so for over thirty years, and is likely to be so for the foreseeable future. We've seen formats and extended character sets come and go; plain text stays with us. We can still read Shakespeare's First Folios, the original Gutenberg Bible, the Domesday Book, and even the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Rosetta Stone (though we may have trouble with the language!), but we can't read many files made in various formats on computer media just 20 years ago.

We're trying to build an archive that will last not only decades, but centuries.

The point of putting works in the PG archive is that they are copied to many, many public sites and individual computers all over the world. No single disaster can destroy them; no single government can suppress them. Long after we're all dead and gone, when the very concept of an ISP is as quaint as gas streetlamps, when HTML reads like Middle English, those texts will still be safe, copied, and available to our descendants.
[...edit...]
We also encourage other open formats based on plain text, like HTML and XML, and even occasionally not-so-open ones when simple formatting isn't enough, but plain text is the only format we're sure of in a rapidly-changing technological landscape.

See, everything will be OK. Take a deep breath and calm down, Scientific American.

Edit: On reading the original article more carefully, it seems the author is talking about the current DRM-obsessed ebook market, rather than making a general statement that ebooks are inherently incapable of being valid longterm storage format. Fair enough, I'll agree with him on that!

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by toronado

This is kinda old (Nov 4th), but didn't see it posted anywhere:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...with-e-readers

Anyone else find that statement a bit silly? Especially from a tech writer. What is his assertion? That no conversion process could/would take place during the 200 (or 20) years from obsolete electronic formats to current ones?

Add DRM into the equation and ask yourself the same question.
What are the odds to be still able to read a DRM'd ebook 2 years from now?