Philosophers of Antiquity were fascinated by the problem of “coming to be and passing away”, what they called “generation” and “corruption”. There are a number of essays with exactly that title. After a while, stuff goes bad. Why, and what happens to it? And, now that I think of it, how do you get “stuff” in the first place? Where does all the stuff come from? Well, nobody talks about that anymore, at least not in the Academy, and in Anglo-American schools of “analytic” philosophy. But there are places where “passing away” is taken very seriously and is the subject of much earnest brow-wrinkling and brainstorming. If we think about one kind of “passing away”, the loss of digital information, we encounter a very serious matter. So much of our current information is either prepared originally in electronic form, or has been moved from another medium. But, then what? Exactly. How long will the data remain fixed and recoverable? What do we do when we need to recover something that’s on a format or a medium no longer produced, or readable only by devices no longer manufactured? Today’s New York Times in the Science section, discusses the matter, and from a librarian’s point of view, it’s all rather disappointing, because the state of the question hasn’t advanced very much in the oh, say ten years that we have become aware of all this. The article lays out very clearly what the problem is, but the same could be said of any number of treatments published in the late 90s and early part of this century. As Mark Twain said: “nobody DOES anything about it”. Today’s piece uses the material donated to Emory University by the author Salman Rushdie, including two old-timey Apple computers. John Updike left a large number of floppy diskettes to the Harvard Library, which is trying to figure out what to do with them. Nobody has a good answer to this, so far at least. There seems to be a lot of finger-crossing and a large amount of cheery optimism that somehow, things will come out right. Ironies abound in this area. Publishers, for example, find themselves stuck with preservation problems they really don’t want to have. In the print era, they didn’t worry about it. But now the scholarly record is a major business asset, so they have to keep it in good shape. It’s meat and potatoes for them. And that’s just the publication itself. The mass of research data supporting the publication’s conclusion needs preservation and access also, and nobody knows how to do this either. I’ve even heard it said that the best thing to do is to print it out, on acid-free paper, and store in a building with people to keep an eye on it and help users find what they need….oh, wait!
< DigiRot
