Earlier I briefly discussed what it means to preserve information, why it is preserved, and by whom, and now I would like to revisit some of the points made in the first post regarding problems inherent in preservation in a little more detail - namely digital storage formats. Preserving information in the various digital formats available today offers many advantages over the preservation of the original physical information, such as access to more people in more locations (Gwinn, 1996), but it has some downsides as well. These downsides don't seem to be getting quite as much publicity as the upsides, and this has created a somewhat lopsided view of the format that could negatively impact those who rely on it or plan to rely on it in the future.
This is an 8" floppy disk - I still have one box of them left from sometime the 1980's. How many people reading this can remember using these (honestly)? How many even knew they existed? There is data preserved on this disk - not much, but some - yet I cannot access it because I have no 8" floppy drive, nor do I have an IBM system 34 to read the information even if I had the drive. The technology required to access the information preserved on this disk is obsolete and unavailable, therefore the information preserved on this media may as well not even exist - in essence it does not exist.
When the Library of Congress began to investigate the process of digital preservation it conducted a study to better understand what challenges would be involved in the process. They found that due to the progress of technology they were unable to determine how long the digitized information would continue to be accessible. They also found that it was imperative to preserve the original forms in the event of a loss of the digital versions, or for the future as newer technology became available for enhanced digitization (Marcum, 2007).
As technology progresses the ability to access information preserved on the media of older technology is still required to access that information, unless all of the information is moved to a more modern format before the technology required to access it has become unavailable. This continual updating of storage media translates into an ongoing real world cost for the preservation of digital information, which needs to be accounted for when considering what is involved in preserving digital information for the long term future.
Suggested Further Reading:
the Computer History timeline
A Brief History of Computing summary timeline
Works cited:
Feldman, S E. (1997). "It was here a minute ago!" Archiving the Net. Searcher, 5, 52-64.
Gwinn, N. E.. (1996). "Mapping the Intersection of Selection and Funding," Selecting Library and Archive Collections for Digital Reformatting: Proceedings from an RLG Symposium, Mountain View: The Research Libraries Group, Inc., p58.
Marcum, D B. (2007). Digitizing for access and preservation: strategies of the Library of Congress. First Monday, 12(7).
1 comment:
I remember the big 8" floppy disks. I have several formats of old digital preservation methods that I cannot access. My husband and I were sorting through boxes of various disks we own and tried to figure out how to get the information off them. We have large SyQuest tapes of backups but no SyQuest drive to read that format. We pulled all the information of the 3.5" floppy disks so we can at least store that information before we can no longer read them.
Here is a link to a photo of the old SyQuest tapes for those who have not used those: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Syquest44MBcartridge.agr.jpg
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