of technology that is giving us new That makes archivists stop and For now, proliferation of media formats is the order of the
forms of media also is shaping the wonder what media they should day. The good news is that media devices will cost less and store more.
way people think about preserva- use to preserve information.” The bad news is that breaks in continuity from format to format, with the
tion of the past,” Gorry says. “In attendant loss of information, will persist.
some respect, throwing away stuff Libraries have faced a similar prob- “The problem will be simplified, somewhat,” says van Horn, “because
seems to be part of digital culture. lem before in preserving paper that optical storage media—CDs and DVDs—will continue. They won’t replace
On the one hand, you have people has acid in it, but the library com- tapes completely, but the things that evolve the slowest stay around the lon-
who have built up collections, but munity is struggling mightily with gest. So tape backup will probably be around for a long time, and so will
there also are people who are, in digital proliferation and extinction. books. The ultimate format will probably be something like the crystals in
some sense, exhilarated by the fact the Superman movies that contain the whole world of knowledge.”
that they have to throw everything “There’s a lot of awareness that The truth is that it’s very hard to know in advance what will work and
out. They wouldn’t have much it’s a really significant problem what won’t because of the complex interaction between technology and
regret and would deal with it as that stands in the way of ambi- the uses to which people put it. “The marketplace drives innovation,”
another chance to go get a bunch tious and important digitization says Gorry. “I read papers describing storing of information on molecules
of new things.” projects,” says Spiro. “The Li- in various ways and storing information in other forms, but I don’t re-
Not everyone is so comfortable brary of Congress recently re- ally know what’s going to happen. The one thing that we do know with
facing the prospect of losing infor- ceived an allocation of, I think, some certainty is that storage capacity is a factor. The government will
mation, however. “I really worry $100 million for the National step in to try to make these things backward compatible, but that almost
that it’s going to be Newspeak Digital Information Infrastruc- never works.”
over and over again,” says
Daugherty. “All I can
hope is that institutional
mechanisms, such as uni-
versities, maintain the
“There's not much
“I'd try occasionally
continuity.”
economic incentive
to restore stuff off
to make easy con-
floppy disks, and
Change is the only
version paths be-
sometimes it would
constant, goes an old
tween old and new
work and other
saying that has special
media. In any case,
times it wouldn't.
currency today when you
how far back will
The reliability of
consider the 23 exabytes
such paths go?”
these transport-
of new yearly data esti-
able media is only
—Tony gorry
mated by the UC–Berke-
mediocre.”
ley researchers. It is true,
h— ubert daugherty
however, that a lot of that
data is not necessarily
worth preserving. “Peo-
ple generally seem to have
relatively little mourning
giving up stuff that is not
that memorable,” says
ture and Preservation Program to Networking might provide a pragmatic approach to uni-
Gorry. “After listening to a Brit-
study the problem and develop versal digitalization, but networking poses challenges of accessibility, even
ney Spears album for a few years,
strategies for long-term preserva- aside from incompatibilities in software and between different versions of
who cares about listening to it one
tion of digital content. And there browsers. “There’s so much information going online that trying to find
more time? If she has to go, she
are efforts under way in library what you need is becoming harder and harder,” says van Horn. “Also,
has to go.”
schools and departments of com- networking may help with transferring data between hard drives, but it
Granted, some of us may not
puter science.” doesn’t solve the problem of storage outside of drives.”
mind losing some of the “informa-
“We all should understand the Kelber says that loss of information is a dilemma that needs closer at-
tion” out there, but there is a lot
obstacles,” says Perzynska, “not tention. “Unfortunately, people who work with media are not sufficiently
of stuff that should be preserved,
just those of us who sit here try- aware of it because many tend to think only technologically—they think
and that challenges archivists and
ing to make sense of all this huge that if we get this system hooked up with that system, we’ve done our
collectors especially, though they
influx of information. Electronic jobs. But the cultural implications make it far too important to remain
now have better tools for pres-
media developers should work just a technological issue.”
ervation than ever in the form of
closely with the community and
the Internet, powerful databases,
help us create resources for ar- Perhaps we eventually will reach a barrier beyond which we cannot make
and more capacious hard drives.
chiving instead of just producing data devices faster, smaller, and more efficient—something akin to an infor-
“Some of the things we’re not
and jumping from one technol- mation speed of light. Until then, of course, we’re unlikely to stop creating
able to preserve because we can-
ogy to another, because that’s ever-new formats to supplant older ones. And in the process, information will
not transfer them,” says Kinga
what’s scary—people want to use be subject to another law of nature—the law of natural selection. Information
Perzynska, director of the Wood-
all these different technologies in that is robust and useful will find a home somewhere in cyberspace, and that
son Research Center in Fondren
producing and searching for in- which is no longer viable will die out and vanish, as extinct as sandblasted
Library. “But even when we can,
formation, but at the same time hieroglyphs and the Library at Alexandria.
there is the problem of how long
they do not consider guidelines
the new media are going to last to
designed to help us preserve
preserve the information we have.
information.”
Winter ’04 21
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56