Need some email/colo service -- recommedations?

[Chris Devers]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Mark J. Dulcey wrote:

> [an excellent overview of the issues surrounding data archiving on both
>  tape and optical media, and how both offer serious problems]


/me looks back longingly at good old papyrus scrolls



I'd just *love* to know what historians will think of this era 500 or 1000
years from now. On one hand, we seem to be accumulating data more
voraciously than any previous generation; on the other hand, we're storing
almost all of it in formats that we can't guarantee will be around just a
few decades from now, nevermind centuries. 

Is anyone interested in transferring all this stuff over to whatever will
happen to be the hip new format 30 or 60 years from now? I doubt it. 

Meanwhile, libraries around the world are destroying records like
newspapers and magazines, converting them to delicate formats like
microfilm & cd-r that [a] aren't proven to be any more long-lived than
paper and [b] can only be accessed with delicate instruments like
computers, which  may or may not be around in a currently recognizeable
form in 500 years, but which probably *won't* have anything like a CD
drive unless the owner is some kind of retro-obscuratanist luddite of the
same variety that would today spend time at renaissance fairs or civil war
re-enactments :)

It would be a great irony if our era ends up becoming a black hole in the
historical record, and all because we thought that things like tapes, cds,
and digital watches were a pretty neat idea...



-- 
Chris Devers