Whoops, There Goes Another CD-ROM
Storing information on disk and tape is convenient, but how long will it last?
Time bomb. Any computer user who has tried to find software to translate WordPerfect 4.0 is already familiar with the problem. In government and industry, the difficulties are magnified. Dectape and UNIVAC drives, which for years recorded massive amounts of government data, have vanished, as have software programs like FORTRAN II. Often, archivists don't discover that data are inaccessible until someone requests the information. Donald Waters, director of the Digital Library Federation, calls the problem a time bomb whose full impact will register only in the future.
Instances of lost data already have begun to surface. Waters himself faced the problem a few years ago when, as associate librarian for Yale University Library, he developed a project to transfer 2,000 books from microfilm to optical disk. Midway through the project, the software he was using became obsolete, and the disks no longer could be easily read. At the New York State Archives, Margaret Hedstrom, now at the University of Michigan, tried unsuccessfully to read magnetic tapes, recorded in the 1960s, which mapped land use throughout the state. On a larger scale, satellite photos of the Brazilian Amazon taken during the 1970s--data critical to establishing deforestation trends both regionally and globally--are also trapped on indecipherable magnetic tapes.
There's no quick fix in sight. But Marcum says that librarians and archivists must now start thinking about preservation as soon as new knowledge is generated--deciding what's important to save, putting the information into as common and standard a format as possible, and carefully recording what machinery and software were used to encode the data. This week, the Getty Conservation and Information Institutes will convene a meeting in Los Angeles to discuss these issues. Some archivists look to technology as a long-term solution. At Rand, for example, senior computer scientist Jeff Rothenberg is designing new kinds of "emulation software," programs that instruct new computers to behave like older ones so they can decipher obsolete digital data.
Ironically, some of the latest ideas sound more like the past than the future. Norsam Technologies, for instance, is promoting HD-Rosetta, a system that "permanently and safely" stores historical documents--but only if they are converted from digital back to analog data. Another company, Cobblestone Software, actually uses paper to print out complex patterns of dots and dashes representing computer files. Called PaperDisk, the product is designed to resist the damage that heat, cold, and magnetism inflict on magnetic and optical media. The company says its invention should last for hundreds of years: about as long as old-fashioned, top-quality paper.
A lost legacy?
The life expectancy of various media used to store government
documents and other information at 68 degrees Fahrenheit and 40
percent relative to humidity.
[Data for chart are not available.]
Source: National Media Lab
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