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Stumpage Reports
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Tuesday, July 15, 2003 :::
Quote of the Day:
"Digital documents last forever -- or five years, whichever comes first."
--- Jeff Rothenberg, computer scientist, quoted in Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era , in the June 2003 issue of The American Historical Review.
Another quote from
the same article, I can't resist it...
"Ten to twenty percent of vital data tapes from the Viking Mars mission," notes Deanna Marcum, the president of the Council on Library Information Resources, "have significant errors because magnetic tape is too susceptible to degradation to serve as an archival storage medium." Often, records lack sufficient information about their organization and coding to make them usable. According to Kenneth Thibodeau, director of the National Archive and Record Administration's Electronic Records Archives program, NARA lacked adequate documentation to make sense of several hundred reels of computer tapes from the Department of Health and Human Resources and data files from the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse. Some records could be recovered by future digital archaeologists but sometimes only through an unaffordable "major engineering challenge." The greatest concern is not over what has already been lost but what historians in fifty years may find that they can't read.
::: posted by tom at 1:02 PM
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