How can we be sure we'll remember our digital past?
As technology evolves, data from outmoded machines is put at risk; panel addresses pathways and costs.
from the February 14, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 4
The international panel brings together computer scientists, lawyers, archivists, and economists from universities, corporations, and federal agencies. The effort is backed by the National Science Foundation, the Library of Congress, and several other organizations.
"I'm excited," says Ann Ferguson, who is not on the panel, but has wrestled with the issue as project manager for the Digital Futures Alliance in Seattle. "The task force has all the right people and represents a cross section of the major interests. You need to have a large panel, because if there were an easy answer, we would have done it by now."
Since 2000, the Library of Congress has collected a trove of recent history that was "born digital," particularly websites and YouTube videos from presidential elections.
But the project's funding has faced significant cutbacks from Congress. This stoked the debate on how to make such collections financially sustainable.
Fading media, formats
The problem of digital preservation reaches across two standards. There's the media – floppies, CDs, hard drives – and the format of the files themselves – does it run in DOS, Hypercard, ClarisWorks 2.0?
Microsoft tackles this issue of "legacy" computing by running a kind of corporate museum. The company protects its multiplatform history by preserving old copies of "every major hardware and software change," says Lee Dirks, director of Scholarly Communications at Microsoft and a task force member.
"We've got computers stored on campus that go back to the Altair, the first computer [to run Microsoft software]," he says. "In fact, we bought multiple copies of the Altair just in case."
But maintaining antique computers is a costly way to keep the past alive.
A concept that is gaining momentum, Mr. Dirks says, is emulation, where programmers trick modern computers into thinking the way their classic cousins did. This lets them run old software without retro machines. Another problem arises when the emulator itself is written for last generation's operating systems. Do you write an emulator to handle the original emulator?
A more likely approach to long-term preservation is migration, says Berman. This calls for updating the file format every generation – without changing the contents, one hopes. This method has problems, as well. Some of the original context will be lost in translation, says Dirks. Also, the scale of the conversation will snowball as the number, size, and back-catalog of the files increases with each passing generation of technology.
RSS feed