Preservation strategies in academic and research libraries are not new concepts. However, with an increasing amount of digital content, organizations are having to cope with a new set of preservation issues.

Digital preservation is in its infancy worldwide and presents some difficult technological issues. Since the creation of digital media, over 200 different storage mediums have been invented ranging from magnetic tape to CD-Rom. Each of these mediums present a variety of their own preservation issues and also require a diverse range of technology which in many cases is no longer manufactured. In addition to this, there are thousands of different formats in which data can be stored on each medium; and each type of storage format may also require a specific piece of software to interpret the data's meaning.

So what is a library to do in order to protect digital content? There are no clear standards in the area of digital preservation and with most institutions lacking resources already, how are they to tackle these issues?

This blog documents the joint investigation into the preservation of digital assets such as ejournals and eprints at Queensland University of Technology and Simon Fraser University.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Media Obsolecence

The 1960 U.S. Census was stored on a now obsolete computer tape. Only one machine in the U.S. can read those tapes, and that machine is in the Smithsonian Institute.

Magnetic tape, on which most of the world's computer backups are stored, can degrade within a decade.

About 20 percent of the data collected for NASA's 1976 Viking Mars landing is completely unreadable and lost forever. With over 1000 people working on the landing alone can you imagine how much they spent to get that 20% of data in the first place?

posted by bunknpushie at 2:11 PM

1 Comments:

Anonymous Arnold said...

What's sad is that we're probably the last generation to be able to look at photos of our great grandparents. Whilst we have printed photos to look at, chances are that our own great grandchildren will only have the photos on, to them, some totally obselete media.

Yet, how many people even think about such things?

4:22 AM

 

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