"While acid paper is prone to deterioration in terms of brittleness and yellowness, the deterioration does not become apparent for at least six decades; and when the deterioration begins, it progresses slowly. It is also highly possible to retrieve all information without loss after deterioration is spotted. The recording media for digital data deteriorate at a much more rapid pace, and once the deterioration starts, in most cases there is already data loss."
I enjoyed the good points the article made about deterioration specifically, as many of us aren't readily aware of the details. One major point I liked was on obsolescence. Because we are in many ways barreling our way into this new age of technological communication, maybe as much as 70% of what we have done or written using this new technology (i.e websites, floppy disk information, e.t.c) the past 60 years or so is no longer accessible by today's machines and software.
I was both scared and awed by "Digital Dark Age" in that I completely agree about this problem with information accessibility and it kind of goes back to our Digital Archives tour in that our wonderfully informed guide spoke about preservation, and for me, preserving in many places and in different formats is very important. Even Dr. Cebula was happy that he could preserve the data on his drive, and in the nick of time, which maybe would have been pointless if he had backed it up on one of those 8-inch floppy disks.
The actual definiton of "digital preservation" was good in that I got to read different sources and their view of it. In terms of the actual term, I liked definition number one as it was the most concise, and to me the most all encompassing. "Digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and born digital content regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time." (ALA 2007:2) I favored number two in what "long-term" would mean: "a period of time long enough for there to be concern about the impacts of changing technologies, including support for new media and data formats, and of a changing user community, on the information being held in a repository. This period extends into the indefinite future." (CCSDS 2002: 1-11) Here too is a good point about "why bother" in that even if you've got that disk and the software to read it, maybe the new computer doesn't even have the drive for that disk, just as our computers now don't have a drive for an 8-inch floppy disk.
I know that Dr. Cebula must have glowed along with everyone else, when the report on the archives was made, as it said basically this is a unique project, it is nice to see what a little funding will do, and the important work this archive does is wonderful, and so on. Having your work vindicated is a must experience in any scholar's experience and hopefully we all get that experience at some point. I also enjoyed seeing other archives, and what they've attempted to do, Australia in particular was enjoyable to look at and browse a bit, and I wonder if they take advantage of that dry and stable climate they're so famous for in this effort?
Omeka is fascinating and I look forward to working on it even further. I tried to work on it since Dr. Cebula sent us the ok, and think I've made a little progress, and hopefully we can spend long hours in the few classes we have left to tinker with it some more.
As for myself, I sometimes wonder how unrecognizable computers may or may not be when I finally retire (probably 85 the way the government keeps raising the bar). Even now, we can read the latest magazines concerning this technology and marvel at what they seem to come up with a week or month at a time; and for me this only reinforces the points made in this week's readings. Please have a look at this article, and how cutting edge this technology seems to be:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_optical_data_storage
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