[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, Courtney—or 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)


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%





More information about the Koreanstudies mailing list