Lynne:

 

While to a certain extent this is true, I would put forth a different idea that if people believe that information is necessary to be saved, they will find a way to save that information no matter what form it is stored on.

 

Lately, Discovery Science has been running Carl Sagen’s Cosmos series, a show which I liked when it first came out and still do today.  In one of the episodes, Dr. Sagen is discussing all of the knowledge about the universe that has been lost from the great thinkers of places like ancient Greece and Rome, including teachings about the history of the world, different heavenly bodies (planets and stars), mathematics, science, etc.  Guess what…all of this information was in written form at some point.  Guess what else…it’s all lost.  For whatever reason, with the fall of the Greek and Roman empires, the people of the time didn’t feel it necessary to save this material, so even though it was in written form, and probably decipherable today, it is still lost.

 

I don’t want to start a war about what is better, paper, pictures or electronic.  However, I also don’t believe that just because something is written down on paper, it is somehow safer than in another format.  What it really comes down to is the desire to see that material saved and the people necessary to ensure that the information isn’t lost, no matter what form it takes.

 

What you mention below in this series is a common thread in science fiction.  Read “Ridley Walker” and you will read about a society that has lost all ability to use technology due to a great war that broke out (if memory serves correct, it was a nuclear war).  Ridley, the main character in the book, comes to the realization part way through the book that the shiny metal things he is looking at were ancient technology, and he (society) neither has the power (electrical) or knowledge to turn it on.

 

I just had a conversation with a storage expert today.  There is one bit of information that he gave me that will make you think about formats.  He said that like it or now, technology is always the solution killer.  Newer, faster, better technology always comes out to replace what we have today.  This is obvious if you think about it from the manufacturer’s standpoint…they want to sell you something new and keep the revenue coming in.  This isn’t good news for archivists because (in this persons words) “it means migrating to a new format every 5-7 years). 

 

While this isn’t good news, there is a bright side.  If you are digitizing your material for access, or for preservation in the event the original is in danger of loss, migrating files is easier once they are digital.  The migration from one storage medium to another can be automated, and the resulting files can be checked against the originals to ensure all data has transferred.  So, while the initial cost of digitizing could be high, subsequent migrations will be less. 

 

John Walko

Media Archive Manager

Scene Savers

www.scenesavers.com

 

 

 

I have been reading the SciFi fantasy trilogy "Voyage of the Jerle Shannara" by Terry Brooks.  I'd like to share with you what I discovered in several chapters toward the end of the second volume that speak to preservation of information and the future.

 

The essence of the plot, to that point, is that "the last of the Druids" and several persons picked carefully for their special talents, have embarked on a journey to a land several months distant to recover a treasure of profound magic that is more than 3000 years old.  Toward the end of the second book, it suddenly became clear to me that the main characters were not from a civilization of "Middle Earth", but a time 3000 years into the future from our present time.  The area which they came to explore was a vast place of metal that was in ruins from "the Great War" and was guarded by laser beams that shot "fire threads" and mechanical, robotic dogs. The treasure that the Druid was seeking, he thought, were books with all the knowledge of the world housed in what would have been called a Library. He believed this knowledge would alleviate the poverty and correct the lack of knowledge in his civilization.  But as he searched the building in which he knew they were housed, he found no large shelving units nor closets in which such items could have been preserved.   He then looked for an alternate method of preserving the information and discovered a room in the hub of this vast electronic village with machinery that held disks.   Voices could be heard as the disks were constantly being reformatted automatically onto new disks to prevent loss of information.   He realized at that moment that there was no knowledge nor equipment in his world that could translate any of the material on the disks, and he had to make the decision to abandon taking the disks back because they would be useless, or destroying the monster that controlled the systems and therefore destroy the disks as well.

 

Does this not speak to the dilemma that we constantly discuss on the ListServ about the longevity of disks and the constant turnover of the equipment to access the information they contain?   Thank about it …. What will happen in 3000 years when a civilization of unknown proportions seeks to discover and decipher the contents of the information that we have preserved?  What will be their best chance … Paper or disks?