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Re: arsclist Digital knowledge preservation
At 09:15 AM 6/17/2002 -0700, Paul T. Jackson wrote:
Although ARSC started with intentions of learning what collections of
recordings were available and what the collections contained. Much work
was being done with regard to preserving music and speech. As the report
below suggests, perhaps ARSC needs to expand, just as some libraries are
expanding by preserving what is on the Internet with preserving knowledge
that is on tape.
HUMAN KNOWLEDGE HELD DIGITALLY MAY BE LOST
The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
has warned that techniques and policies must be created to save steadily
increasing levels of digital information. In a paper published by UNESCO on
digital conservation they noted that with more and more information being
published digitally for specific computers and operating systems, it will be
necessary to maintain the technology along with the digital files. The
paper cites a story about a neurobiologist looking for data from the
mid-1970s who was told that the software to read the computer tapes did not
exist and the "programmers who knew it had died." Consultations on best
practices in preserving digital files have begun within UNESCO.
[SOURCE: AllAfrica.com, AUTHOR: Accrea Mail]
(<http://www.sdnp.undp.org/perl/news/articles.pl?id=4358&do=gpage>http://www.sdnp.undp.org/perl/news/articles.pl?id=4358&do=gpage)
The argument is valid and far from new. The issue includes both the format
and the medium of storage. It was faced on space programs some years ago
and has not been solved; there are warehouses full of data from satellite
systems of the 1970s and 1980s which can no longer be reduced; neither the
readers nor the software to deal with them are available today, but they
are preserved because they were created at great expense, contain valuable
information, and optimists believe that some day a solution will be found.
The solution proposed decades ago and not implemented even today is to
establish specific, defined formats and media for such storage even if it
costs some efficiency. Thus, TXT is preferred over any word-processing
format, Compact Disc in ISO 9660 over any tape and so on.
Having suffered the problems of recovering aged data, I recommend that ARSC
establish a set of digital formats for its records in order to minimize the
risk of obsolescence. I limit my own attempts at preservation to
self-contained CD-ROMs in strict ISO 9660 format and include Windows
retrieval capability. The language is HTML 2. Audio files are in MP3, which
is not as well-defined as I would prefer. Unfortunately, the alternatives
(WAV, AIFF) are inefficient in use of space and would not serve my purposes
as well.
Mike
mrichter@xxxxxxx
http://www.mrichter.com/
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