Eternal Bits by MacKenzie Smith. MacKenzie
Smith, the associate director of technology at the MIT Libraries, has
written a fascinating article about the challenges of digital
preservation, with a focus on the DSpace Project. The subtitle is "How
Can We Preserve Digital Files and Save Our Collective Memory?" (An
equally pressing question is, how can we find and evaluate what is
important among so much digital stuff?) ____JH
___________
"It took two centuries to fill the U.S.
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., with more than 29 million
books and periodicals, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs,
4.8 million maps, and 57 million manuscripts. Today it takes about 15
minutes for the world to churn out an equivalent amount of new digital
information. It does so about 100 times every day, for a grand total of
five exabytes annually. That's an amount equal to all the words ever
spoken by humans, according to Roy Williams, who heads the Center for
Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology,
in Pasadena."
"In an era when the ability to read a
document, watch a video, or run a simulation could depend on having a
particular version of a program installed on a specific computer
platform, the usable life span of a piece of digital content can be
less than 10 years. That's a recipe for disaster when you consider how
much we rely on stored information to maintain our scholarly, legal,
and cultural record and to help us with, and profit from, our digital
labor. Indeed, the ephemeral nature of both data formats and storage
media threatens our very ability to maintain scientific, legal, and
cultural continuity, not on the scale of centuries, but considering the
unrelenting pace of technological change, from one decade to the next."
[EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online]
6:04:42 PM  Google It!.
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