Objective history, that grand imagined jewel of the Western
literary world was given a lesson in Oklahoma last month
when the Thunderbeings sent 78 tornados to remind we
informationed folks that new is "great." That only the
mountains last forever and that the development of individual
and community knowledge is the only possible real meaning
of life.
I asked my Aunt about Morris, the little town where my
grandparents are buried and where 98% of the town was
lost to the thunderers a few years back. She said, its sooo
beautiful. Everything is new now. But will America
be comfortable when everything is lost. What will be the
carrier of the knowledge now that the songs are banal and
the singers are so fragile?
REH
TECHNOLOGY
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 form
at 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 t
ransferred 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
