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Digital Dark Age: Digital Data Loss and Preservation Resources 1. Stories
of Digital Data Loss |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Even Digital Memories Fade | New York Times Article on the problem of digital data storage |
| Screenplay Salvaged | "Alien Versus Predator" nealry lost to obsolete technology save for the efforts of an online pirate. |
| CD Rot | CDs turning out to be not as indestructible as we thought. |
| The Myth of the 100-Year CD-Rom | Are we putting too much faith in the ubiquitous "recordable CD", or CD-R? |
| Old
Records Saved by Particle Physics
|
Particle physicists in California are swapping bosons for basslines in a bid to breathe fresh life into the earliest sound recordings. A technique developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory allows researchers to create digital copies of old records without damaging the fragile discs. |
| Loading your camera with film is almost a thing of the past. But, says Joanna Wane, the digital revolution is creating a gaping hole in our heritage. | |
| Hackers respond to password challenge | When the creator of a library archive system for a Norwegian cultural and literary museum died, he took the password with him. |
| Digital Domesday book unlocked | A rich digital archive of British life in the 1980s has been brought back to life by researchers from the UK and the US. They have developed a way to access the information gathered by the BBC's Domesday project which had been stored on outdated technology. |
| Digital Domesday Book lasts 15 years not 1000 | It was meant to be a showcase for Britain's electronic prowess - a computer-based, multimedia version of the Domesday Book. But 16 years after it was created, the £2.5 million BBC Domesday Project has achieved an unexpected and unwelcome status: it is now unreadable. |
| NASA Data Point to Mars 'Bugs,' Scientist Says | The data collected by a 1975 Viking probes which possibly suggest the existence of Martian microbes, was mostly lost because it was stored on long-neglected computer tapes which are now unreadable. Only partial printouts of the data remain. |
| Excerpt from: "Long-Term Spatial Data Preservation and Archiving: What are the Issues." | The is report by Denise Bleakly of the Sandia National Laboratories shows examples of two major instances of digital data loss. Data collected by the Canada Land Data System which was archived in 1974 on nine-track tapes. The report details the efforts made only thirty years later to extract this data. The second story is from the 1960s decennial census. The data is stored on tapes for which there is no longer hardware. (For entire report click here) |
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| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| British Library Starts Email Archive | The British Library is creating an archive to store the emails of the nation's top authors and scientists, as the written word is replaced by electronic messages. |
| The end of history | In centuries to come, what will scholars be able to learn of the great events and discoveries of our time? As paper records are replaced by unstored e-mails and obsolete software, we may be entering a new digital dark age. |
| Tales From the Crypt | How a handful of Mormons with an infrared camera unlocked the secrets buried beneath Vesuvius. |
| The
State of Preservation Programs in American College and Research Libraries |
A new joint study by the Council on Library
and Information Resources, Association of Research Libraries (ARL), University Libraries Group (ULG), and Regional Alliance for Preservation (RAP) provides new data on the preservation of library resources today and suggests how professional organizations, consortia, and funding agencies can help academic libraries improve their preservation capabilities. |
| Burying the Past | This article addresses the problems with digital rather
than physical preservation of historic documents: "In our rush to digitize the past, we may be destroying vast swathes of graphic-design history." |
| Digital dark age: Many fed e-records lost | Most federal electronic records of historical interest are not being adequately preserved and may be permanently lost, according to a General Accounting Office report released June 17 02002. (For entire report click here) |
| Data Extinction | It's too late for old word-processing files. But new technologies will preserve access to digital photos, music and other electronic records forever. |
| The Digital Dark Age | An overview, written by David Emberton, published on Shift.com, on the dangers of digital data loss and a suggestion that networking is the solution. |
| In February of 2002 a newly formed Digital Preservation Coalition in the United Kingdom addressed the House of Commons about the importance of considering long term digital data preservation. | |
| Fading Bits of History | In an article published on ABCNews.com, Michael S. James writes that while there is considerable disagreement over the extent to which the historical record is in jeopardy — with many feeling it is quite secure — archivists and preservation officials agree there has been a change in the way we are recording history. |
| The Digital Dark Ages | We are in danger of losing knowledge and culture because of the way we communicate in the modern world. Marilyn Deegan and Simon Tanner set out the scale of the problem and what is being done to try and solve it. |
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| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Into The Future: On Preservation of Knowledge in the Electronic Age | Directed by Terry Sanders this video relates the loss of all of NASA/JPL early satellite data through a series of mishaps. |
| Dark Ages II: When the Digital Data Die | Bryan P. Bergeron shows why our data is at far greater risk than we've ever imagined, and envisions a frightening future, where so much critical information is lost that civilization itself could collapse. Bergeron examines how we're storing our most precious data. |
| The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age | [Cherchi Usai] has drawn . . . the picture of a worldwide crisis that commands our unconditional concern. His portrait of a culture ignoring the loss of its own image is a devastating moral tale, the recognition that there is something very wrong with the way we are taught to disregard the art of seeing as something ephemeral and negligible. Martin Scorsese |
