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A "digital dark age" looms
Silcon Valley's Computer History Museum has produced a video that makes a stark case for the precarity and urgency of digital data preservation, archiving, and format-shifting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSlMzirvsFc&sns=tw
The video fingers "industry" for privileging innovation over preservation. (They're talking to you, Microsoft, with your constant stream of new products that don't recognize their own ancestors.) But it should be noted that IP regulation changes and library practices themselves are also putting modern history at risk. (And it's not just computer history: Lawrence Lessig points out that the suspension of public deposit requirements for media companies has left our cultural commons bereft of the vast majority of 20th-century broadcast history.)
Check the video's footage of old storage formats. Ludd knows I'm hanging on to a few of these, and there are more I've never seen before. It's a sobering experiment to try accessing a not-so-old 3.5" floppy these days. CDs and DVDs are well on their way out. How many of us even now can play back audio cassettes? (That's the main reason there's a collaborative project now digitizing the AU library's historic Theatre of the Air broadcasts.)
What this video asks, though, is how to "future-proof" such digital format-shifting when digital formats themselves prove to obsolesce so rapidly?
- Look what just arrived on my doorstep! #howeducationworks from @au_press is now available in print...
June 29, 2023 - 1:49pm
Jon Dron
Mark A. McCutcheon
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Comments
It gets worse, since consumer digital recording devices commonly output to lossy formats (i.e., MP3, MP4, JPG).
Analog output such as an LP still has archival value if you have the storage facility.
Perhaps Superman crystals are an option?
( i.e., http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100622095050.htm ; http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sabl/2005/March/03-polarons.html )
Yeah, I never understood why the RIAA and CRIA got so enraged over MP3 sharing when the format quality is so audibly inferior to CD quality. (Appealing to consumers' taste for quality instead of suing inner-city children and single mothers would have been way better PR for that industry.)
The vinyl example is a good reminder that media formats don't succeed each other in anything like a linear way. Vinyl never went away, while cassette tapes came and went; in the digital domain, PDF, JPG, and MP3 have proven relatively robust -- so far -- in that they've both been around a venerable decade or so.
I agree that it is important to recognise the quality issue with PDF, and lossy formats. A degraded output or a high resolution output? (assuming that only text has full resolution, whereas everything else is a distant second choice to analog audio/visual input). I would rather have the source file format than the exported PDF version. However, I'm not sure there will always be a choice in the future as people find it inconvenient (and possibly confusing) to have multiple copies of files in different formats.
If open office files were rendered directly in a web browser with PDF like features (i.e., markup), perhaps there would be a chance for some data transparency.