Digital Preservation Lasts Until the Heat Death of the Universe or Five Years

October 4, 2016

(Whichever comes first)

Here are my notes and references from my lightning talk. The slides for the talk itself can be found on iCloud.

Here’s the article that inspired this talk, Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Information, written by Jeff Rothenberg waaay back in 1995 for Scientific American.

The year is 2045, and my grandchildren (as yet unborn) are exploring the attic of my house (as yet unbought). They find a letter dated 1995 and a CD-ROM (compact disk). The letter claims that the disk contains a document that provides the key to obtaining my fortune (as yet unearned). My grandchildren are understandably excited, but they have never seen a CD before—except in old movies—and even if they can somehow find a suitable disk drive, how will they run the software necessary to interpret the information on the disk? How can they read my obsolete digital document?

If you want to read more by Mr. Rothenberg about digital longevity, he has a web page for it. And here, at the Council on Library and Information Resources. If video is more your thing, on YouTube: How Far We’ve Come. Just so you know that there are other views, and other voices, Rothenberg still Wrong.

References

On the scale of our data collections.

• Google’s Datacenters on Punch Cards, “what if?” ca 2013

Lost data.

• “Thousands of Electronic Case Files Lost in Transition”, Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2014.
• have i been pwned?, which I check every time I hear of yet another breach.

Legacy systems.

• Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems, GAO Report, GAO-16-468, May 2016.
• The U.S. is still using floppy disks to run its nuclear program, CNN, May 26, 2016.

Digital preservation

• Google Link in Supreme Court Case Shows Struggle on Citation, Fortune, June 22, 2016.
• Utah v. Strieff
• https://perma.cc
• Digital Collections at the University of Maryland
• The Wayback Machine
• {json:api}, “If you’ve ever argued with your team about the way your JSON responses should be formatted, JSON API can be your anti-bikeshedding tool.”
• IBM TS4500 Tape Libray Robots. I, for one, welcome our benevolent robot overlords.
• Emulators written in JavaScript. JavaScript has become the “Rosetta Stone” of all other digital systems. So, we might be able to emulate ancient hardware, after all. We’re ready to go back to the moon: Apollo Guidance System

OMG

• This Old-Ass Commodore 64 Is Still Being Used to Run an Auto Shop in Poland
• McLaren needs a 20-year-old Compaq laptop to maintain its F1 supercar

All the feels

• Project Apollo - Glorious scans of the original Hasselblad images.
• Kate Dohe, “punk-ass book jockey.” For more on knitting, wine and bicycles, sometimes all at once, see Facebook.