| Maybe we should print this out on acid-free paper-thin flexible wood-pulp sheets stitched to together to form linear organized aggregations. Each aggregation would contain one or more works and be searchable using a SQL-like database. To make this plan really work there would need to be a collection of geographically distributed long term physical repositories that would receive periodic updates as new material became available. All joking aside, I do wonder wither digital or analogue formats are better able to survive into the distant future. * What impact will DRM have on the accessibility of our knowledge to future historians? * Is anything recoverable from a harddrive or flash media after 500 years in a landfill? * Will compressed files be more of less recoverable? What about git archives? * Will the future know the shape of our plastic GI Joes toys but not the content of the GI Joes cartoon? |
There are 5000 year old clay tablets we can still read.
There are centuries old documents on paper, vellum etc. that we can still read.
I personally have decades-old paper documents I can easily read, and a box of floppies I can't.
It's not just a problem of unreadable physical media, I have a database file on a perfectly readable HD that was generated by an application that is no longer available. I might be able to interrogate it somehow, but it won't be easy.
Digital formats and connectivity make LOCKSS easier, so that's a plus. There's less chance of a fire or flood or space-limited librarian destroying the last known copy. However, without archivists actively transforming content to new formats as required, it might only take a few decades before a lot of content starts to require a massive effort to read.