Miriam recently told me that she thinks she will never stop paying for Spotify. I said that we never know what might pop up to replace it; just look at iTunes! We never thought of Spotify as an alternative until it was made possible. That got me to think that somehow, one day, it is possible I wont be able to listen to the music that I have on iTunes.
The article from Inside Higher Ed titled, Preventing a Digital Dark Age, discusses this problem in regard to digital documents, research, photos, etc. This is a problem especially since most of the world, including higher education institutions, is moving towards digital technology for production and preservation. However, unforeseen future technology may not be compatible with the digital research that we have now. That would mean that the research and documents that were worked in and created from our present could be lost. Or even something disastrous could happen, which would cause us to lose all our information!
The DPN organization was created to help solve this problem if anything would go wrong. DPN allocates five terabytes to universities (annually) in order to store and preserve the information that the university decides to secure. This information will be stored in three different locations and in many different ways in order to insure access in the future. All the information that is a part of this preservation membership is in a “preservation ecosystem.”
One problem with this ecosystem is that there is a lack of diversity. Most of the members of DPN are large to mid-sized universities. Part of the reason is because smaller universities may not have the budget to pay for the preservation. For larger universities who are not members have the problem of wanting more storage. For example, the amount of digital information that the largest universities would like to store is worth a petabyte, which is 1,000 terabytes. DPN is not even able to store that much information.
There are other organizations like DPN that are working to avoid the loss of all the information and research that is being generated. I never thought of this problem on such a wide scale. Universities today are not just places for people to go for education, they are places for research and innovation. Many universities are hiring experts to work to preserve and decide what to preserve. Not only is there so much research to still be done and information to gather and build on in the future, we now need a way to insure that all this information is accessible to the future generations. They can’t move forward without previous information!
I just spent weeks clearing out stuff in my lab, and I can tell you that I unearthed (and tossed) many kinds of media (zip drives, Bernoulli drives, 5.25″ floppy disks, 3.25″ Floppy Disks, digital tapes of at least 3 formats, and that doesn’t include big reels of magnetic tape, punch cards, punched paper tape, and something called “DEC tapes” that were even earlier and were mostly purged the last time I did this house cleaning. I even found some laser disks which lasted about 5 days as a medium because they were so expensive. It all had data on it that once was important for me. But now, I haven’t got the devices to read almost any of them. It is a real challenge and needs to be considered and planned for. I’ve also just lost access to a backup disk where supposedly my stuff was archived safely — I might with work be able to recover it, but so far, I’ve not had the time or the motive. So both types of storate and individual media evolve and the old ones die. I have often thought about what’s going to happen to family photograph albums you won’t find 30 years from now in the bottom of your closest and lovingly use to remember family and friends now past, now that everything is digital. Assuming the media will be here in 30 years, will jpg, or tif, or gif or png be obsolete and the media the pictures are on too degraded to read? And what will happen to our sense of the history of our families and the perspective we get by seeing young versions of old people? Something to consider.