"Tom Gosse" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > ... I had the chance to listen in on a conversation about which > medium was the best for archiving records. A National > Archives worker said that their research showed that in order > of durability and longevity it was: > * stone - last forever but not practical.
I believe CSIRO (a government scientific institution in Australia) has been looking at etching text onto glass tiles as a means of long-term storage. Of course even if you find a durable physical medium, there's still the question of encoding. We have documents that we can't read because the script used is undecipherable (I think Linear A is still partly undecipherable, and there's a constant debate over how Inka quipus should be read). There's some interesting discussion about how we should mark repositories of high-level nuclear waste in such a way that future generations who may not share a common language with us can recognize them and steer clear. See: http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0115.shtml http://dir.salon.com/story/people/feature/2002/05/10/yucca_mountain/ > Electronic media - standards and software change so fast it > can become unusable in less than a decade ... I wonder if the > programs we record today will be viewable in ten years > from now never mind a hundred. Famously, NASA has telemetry data from the Apollo and other programs and even technical blueprints for the Saturn V that it can no longer read. As a software developer, the lesson I take from this is that there's job security in being a data-format conversion expert. And that anyone who creates a format should document the hell out of it (presumably in plain text, carved on a slab of granite). For electronic data, I think the only key to survivability is to keep moving forward. Every five years, copy your information to a new storage medium and convert it to the most current format for that type of data. But there's an obvious problem there if you're dealing with 'lossy' encoding schemes such as the ones used for compressed video. A few iterations, and - like a sixth-generation copy of a cassette tape or a photocopy - you're left with more noise than signal. Angus -- WWW: http://www.raingod.com/angus/ Blog: http://www.disoriented.net/
