Compatibility with future generations
A little while ago I was asked by a group of students from a neighbouring school for advice on the following: they were putting together the contents for a time capsule that they were intending to bury in their school grounds, to be disinterred in 2100. They wanted to include in it a lot of photographs, some shool magazines and some essays. Their intention was to bury this in electronic format, but they were stuck as to what media to use. If they put it all on CDs or DVDs, would these still be readable in 100 years, and indeed would there be the still be hardware that could be used for this purpose? Or should they use a memory stick?
Of course I was quite unable to offer any useful advice. Or rather, I suggested that the only safe thing they could do would be to include it in hard copy, i.e. on paper. I think they may have been disappointed with this advice, as they probably hoped that the president of a technology-savvy university would have some hi tech solution. Perhaps if I had asked my computing colleagues they might have given some advice, but on the whole I suspect we know very little now about what technology will be available in 100 years and whether it will be sufficiently ‘backwards compatible’ to read a DVD from 2009. Paper just seems safest.
But for me that raises all sorts of other issues.Right now one of the great movements in technology applied to the arts and humanities is digitzation – i.e. the conversion of manuscripts, books and art into electronic format. But how durable is this going to be? How can we be sure that what we are digitizing will be in a format that will still work in 2020, never mind 2100. Or are we going to have to reformat all this stuff every few years for the digital repositories to have any functional value? And if so, what about private archives that don’t have curators who can perform this task whenever it is needed?
I am reminded of this because I am the proud possessor of (I think) 38 computer disks in five an a half inch format. They were assembled in 1992. Now, in 2009, they are not exactly unreadable, but it will take an enormous effort to find some equipment that can do that. And what is more, most of the documents on them were created using word processing software called ‘WordStar’ in DOS (if you have no idea what I am talking about, don’t worry, it’s not worth your while finding out). So even if I can find the necessary hardware, I doubt that it will have the software to read the files. In short, the disks are really useless. I am only glad that I didn’t bother transferring them to 3 inch disks when I was contemplating dong that in 1998 – that too would have been a waste, because those disks are more or less also now unreadable. And do you really think you will be able to plug your USB memory stick into anything in 2030? I doubt it.
And so what this makes me wonder is whether the technophobes and Luddites will have the last laugh. Is all the stuff we are now assembling in computer files doomed to be altogether ephemeral? Will the output of this generation, so overwhelmingly stored only electronically, just fade away and remain, untouchable and unreadable, on old computer media in the back of some dusty drawer? Will our era be thought of, in some 1,000 years time, as a dark age from which nothing survived?
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December 31, 2009 at 5:35 am
The question is does it matter a hoot anyway. And on two fronts. You do not seem all to worried that you cannot open those ’92 doc’s. While with the Arts, I suspect we will muddle our way onwards. We just adore re-setting the frame. You would imagine that at this stage the study of Greece from 480 to say 350BC would be done and dusted. Not a bit of it, the very fact that we are not overloaded with source material means there can be deep and profound arguments along the lines of why did Sophocles have Oedipus blind himself.
As to the files and all the rest sitting in archives, I’m sure there will be some people that will have the ability, after all my degree parchment is in Latin and not Church Latin or anything used for the past 2050 years.
December 31, 2009 at 8:17 am
They could probably do worse than to put their video on youtube or whatever and trust google to migrate the format as time passes.
December 31, 2009 at 5:00 pm
And if they are doing it like that, archiving video on youtube and photographs on eg flickr; then they shouldn’t wait a hundred years, they should add material every year: view the past videos, look at objects stored in a box as part of a growing museum, prepare and record their own entry. They could have a channel for it, only give themselves access, or perhaps, involve schools elsewhere. Often the recent past is more interesting to young people than the long-ago past.
December 31, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Thank you, Vincent and Aoife. I agree of course that there are ways of preserving digitised materials for future compatibility. However, putting it on youtube wouldn’t help the students assembling the time capsule. And seriously, I’m not going to put all my father’s family archives on the Google servers either.
This isn’t keeping me awake at night, but I *was* wondering…
January 7, 2010 at 12:46 pm
F – I know what you mean. I started writing my PhD thesis on Wordstar and by the time I came to finish it (it took a while – different story) there was no way I could access the material. Luckily a technician in the university managed to dig out an old machine in a basement somewhere – it was on the verge of going to the skip. No doubt there is some museum of old computers out there somewhere, but for me it was a close call! These days there seems to be a lot more reverse compatability and I can still open documents created in 1992 (I think!).
January 7, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Perry, getting to read the content of a file isn’t necessarily the issue, rather getting it off the out-of-date media it’s on!
June 2, 2011 at 1:14 pm
As an archivist, I find it fascinating that I can read documents from the 1880s straight off, while documents from the 1980s are often unreadable. (In fact, early 19th century documents on rag paper are even better than later wood-pulp based material). Digital preservation is one of the hot topics in this area and since we can’t keep everything, and at the same time we generate more and more, it becomes all the more vital to filter out the vast amount that won’t have any long term value. Unfortunately that requires a greater degree of long-term thinking than most organisations are willing to commit to. Will our future history get lost in the cloud?
June 2, 2011 at 1:34 pm
If anyone’s interested, there’s the very useful website of the Digital Preservation Coalition: http://www.dpconline.org/