[KS] Re: KSR 1999-02:_Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial
Henny Savenije
adam&eve at henny-savenije.demon.nl
Tue Jul 13 06:18:51 EDT 1999
The following article, from a recent issue of Newsweek could be
of interest in the context of this list:
History: We're Losing It
They told us digital data would last forever. They
lied. How do we save the past before it all
disappears?
By Arlyn Tobias Gajilan
First-time parents Michele and Steve Brigham of New
York can't imagine life without their 6-year-old
daughter, Courtneyor the family camcorder and
camera. Like millions of other parents, the Brighams
have videotaped and photographed their daughter's first
breaths, first steps, first birthday and dozens of
other
events in a rapidly growing library of more than 1,800
minutes of videotape and 3,000 photographs. "It may
seem excessive," admits Michele. "But I think Courtney
will appreciate it all when she grows up."
Unfortunately,
she might have nothing to look at. By the time Courtney
turns 30, sunlight may have faded most of her color
childhood photos, and in the off chance that the tiny
VHS-C videotapes featuring her many firsts survive
decades of heat and humidity, there probably won't be a
machine to play them back on.
Home videos and snapshots aren't all that are at risk.
Librarians and archivists warn we're losing vast
amounts of important scientific and historical material
because of disintegration or obsolescence. Already gone
is up to 20 percent of the data collected on Jet
Propulsion Laboratory computers during NASA's 1976
Viking mission to Mars. Also at risk are 4,000 reels of
census data stored in a format so obscure that
archivists
doubt they'll be able to recover it. By next year, 75
percent of federal government records will be in
electronic form, and no one is sure how much of it will
be readable in as little as 10 years. "The more
technologically advanced we get, the more fragile we
become," says Abby Smith of the Council on Library and
Information Resources.
For years, computer scientists said the ones and zeros
of
digital data would stick around forever. They were
wrong. Tests by the National Media Lab, a
Minnesota-based government and industry consortium,
found that magnetic tapes might last only a decade,
depending on storage conditions. The fate of floppy
disks, videotape and hard drives is just as bleak. Even
the CD-ROM, once touted as indestructible, is proving
vulnerable to stray magnetic fields, oxidation,
humidity
and material decay. The fragility of electronic media
isn't the only problem. Much of the hardware and
software configurations needed to tease intelligible
information from preserved disks and tapes are
disappearing in the name of progress. "Technology is
moving too quickly," says Charlie Mayn, who runs the
Special Media Preservation lab at the National
Archives.
He speaks from experience. In the 1980s, the Archives
transferred some 200,000 documents and images onto
optical disks, which are in danger of becoming
indecipherable because the system archivists used is no
longer on the market. "Any technology can go the way of
eight-track and Betamax," says Smith, whose own
dissertation is trapped on an obsolete 5e-inch floppy.
"Information doesn't have much of a chance, unless you
keep a museum of tape players and PCs around." That
may not be such a farfetched idea. Mayn's
temperature-controlled lab in the bowels of the
National
Archives houses many machines once used to record
history. In one room, archivists are resurrecting the
1948
whistle-stop oratory of President Harry Truman; the
give-'em-hell speeches were recorded on spools of thin
steel wire, an ancestor of reel-to-reel tape
recordings.
Though some of the wires have rusted and snap during
playback, Mayn and his team are busy "migrating," or
transferring, what they're able to recover onto more
stable modern media.
Unfortunately, migration isn't a perfect solution.
"Sometimes not all the data makes the trip," says
Smith.
Recently the Food and Drug Administration said that
some pharmaceutical companies were finding errors as
they transferred drug-testing data from Unix to Windows
NT operating systems. In some instances, the errors
resulted in blood-pressure numbers that were randomly
off by up to eight digits.
So what's to be done? "That's a question no one really
has an answer for," says Smith. A good way to start
is to
separate the inconsequential from the historic, and
save
on simple formats. Making those decisions won't be
easy, especially for families like the Brighams, who
continue to roll video on their young daughter. "We
don't
want to miss anything," says Michele. Unfortunately,
they may have to.
Newsweek, July 12, 1999
-----------------------------
Henny (Lee Hae Kang)
Feel free to visit
http://www.henny-savenije.demon.nl
and feel the thrill of Hamel discovering Korea (1653-1666)
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