Preserving information in changing storage media

We're recording more information than ever, yet we may be less able to preserve it. That's the problem to keep in view. Saving a document today isn't the same as ensuring that someone can still read it centuries from now. Archivists are responsible for that much longer task.

The first paragraph makes the problem concrete by comparing the materials used to store information. Some ancient clay tablets and medieval manuscripts survive beautifully, while books printed on acidic paper in the 1980s are already unreadable. Newer doesn't necessarily mean more durable. The photograph examples make a similar point: black-and-white photographs can last centuries, but color photographs and videotapes have much shorter lives.

There's a fair objection to the ancient examples: we're looking at the objects that survived. We don't see all the tablets or manuscripts that were destroyed. Imagine someone thousands of years from now looking at our surviving records and concluding that everything we made was durable. That would overlook everything we lost. We can notice that limitation without losing track of the author's concern: some materials now holding valuable information deteriorate quickly, and archivists must deal with that.

Computers sound like an answer. Maps, films, photographs and printed materials can all be transferred to compact electronic storage. But fitting everything onto a disk doesn't establish that we'll be able to retrieve it later.

The second paragraph gives us two different problems. First, the equipment becomes obsolete. A disk might still exist, but its contents are useless to us if we no longer have the software or hardware needed to read it. Think of keeping a movie on a disc after losing access to a compatible player. Second, the storage medium itself can deteriorate: recent digital tape is considered safe for only ten years. Losing the reader and losing the recorded data are different ways of losing access.

So archivists have reasons to be wary of depending on computers. Yet doing nothing isn't safe either: the conventional materials they're trying to preserve are also deteriorating. They are working against a deadline imposed by the materials themselves.

The final paragraph adds another challenge. Even if someone develops durable electronic storage, archivists still have to decide what deserves saving. Imagine having time to transfer only part of a collection before the rest becomes unreadable. Better storage won't choose the important records for you. Personal messages and records of major public decisions might sit in the same enormous collection, and someone has to assess their value. That example illustrates the selection problem; the author doesn't give us a fixed ranking of every kind of document.

The ancient works show why preservation matters. Homer and Virgil benefited from being copied repeatedly because people continued to value them. Some works by Plato survived through copies that happened to turn up much later. Other important works disappeared altogether. What reaches us from the past depends partly on deliberate copying and partly on chance; survival isn't a reliable guarantee that the best material was selected.

Today's danger is the scale and urgency of that selection. There is so much information on materials that won't last that archivists may not sort the essential from the dispensable in time. We've moved from fragile records, to the promise and limitations of computers, to decisions about what can be saved. The overall problem is that more information and less durable storage make preservation harder, both technically and as a matter of choosing what to keep.