In the children's
game of telephone, it’s fun to hear how
messages get scrambled as they’re whispered down
a line from one child to the next. But when the objective
is preserving historically significant computer files,
it’s no laughing matter. Already, precious early
NASA data has been lost because it was stored on magnetic
tape that no modern computer can decipher. Nor is there
any guarantee that beloved digital photos or journals
on today’s laptops and CDs will be readable two
machines from now.
The challenge of preserving “born digital”
information and passing it on to future generations
has become a huge issue for libraries and cultural repositories
worldwide, according to Andrew Herkovic, who oversees
foundation relations and external projects for the Stanford
University Libraries. The result could be “a Digital
Dark Age that our children and grandchildren will come
to regret.”
Now, scholars from Stanford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins
and Old Dominion have teamed up with the Library of
Congress to tackle the problem. In a yearlong Archive
Ingest and Handling Test, each participating university
received an identical hard drive loaded with 57,000
digital images, e-mails, audio and video clips gathered
quickly online by scholars at George Mason University
in the weeks following the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The institutions will ingest the archive’s 12-gigabytes
into their own digital systems, add formatting codes
to help organize the material, and then pass the archives
around to each other. By analyzing the consistency of
the files as they are transferred, scholars hope to
come up with standard digital preservation practices
that can be shared by all institutions—no matter
what hardware and software our children’s children
devise.
