In the children's game of telephone, it’s fun to hear how messages get scrambled as they’re whispered down a line from one child to the next. But when the objective is preserving historically significant computer files, it’s no laughing matter. Already, precious early NASA data has been lost because it was stored on magnetic tape that no modern computer can decipher. Nor is there any guarantee that beloved digital photos or journals on today’s laptops and CDs will be readable two machines from now.
The challenge of preserving “born digital” information and passing it on to future generations has become a huge issue for libraries and cultural repositories worldwide, according to Andrew Herkovic, who oversees foundation relations and external projects for the Stanford University Libraries. The result could be “a Digital Dark Age that our children and grandchildren will come to regret.”
Now, scholars from Stanford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Old Dominion have teamed up with the Library of Congress to tackle the problem. In a yearlong Archive Ingest and Handling Test, each participating university received an identical hard drive loaded with 57,000 digital images, e-mails, audio and video clips gathered quickly online by scholars at George Mason University in the weeks following the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The institutions will ingest the archive’s 12-gigabytes into their own digital systems, add formatting codes to help organize the material, and then pass the archives around to each other. By analyzing the consistency of the files as they are transferred, scholars hope to come up with standard digital preservation practices that can be shared by all institutions—no matter what hardware and software our children’s children devise.
