Old
computers lose history record
Wednesday, 23 February, 2000, 17:31 GMT
Computer files: which is the dinosaur?
Vital archaeological records could
be lost as the computers they are stored on become
obsolete. The physical site is nearly always
completely destroyed during a dig, but archaeologists
claim the knowledge they glean from the ground is then
available for posterity. Studies
in York have revealed that in fact data stored on
computers could disappear in little more than a
decade. "The irony is that
archaeological information held in magnetic format is
decaying faster than it ever did in the ground,"
warns William Kilbride of the Archaeology Data Service
(ADS) at the University of York.
Important evidence
The ADS was asked to examine
computer records of 180 Bronze Age excavations in
North East London conducted between 1991 and 1996 by
the Newham Museum Archaeological Service, which has
now closed.
The Newham excavations yielded
important information about London and the Thames
during the Bronze Age, but that data was never
published.
The records comprised more than
6,000 database, geophysical and CAD (Computer Aided
Design) files held on 220 floppy disks.
When they came to examine them, the
archivists found that five percent of the older disks
had become corrupted. The magnetic coating on the
disks had simply succumbed to the slow erosion of
time.
State of the ark
Another problem they encountered was
obsolete formats. In computer terms,1991 is ancient
history. Some of the word processor and database
programmes used then are no longer available.
"The formats of computer files
change rapidly. A file created in state-of-the-art
software one year becomes obsolete the next, as the
software is updated. Old disks are useless when the
hardware is no longer available to read them,"
said archaeologist Keith Westcott.
Finding a computer that will
physically accept old-fashioned 5 ¼ inch or
Amstrad-style 3 inch floppy disks is not easy.
The Newham records have now been
saved to a modern server which is linked to the
internet. If the records had been left on floppy disk
for much longer they would have been lost forever.
The only secure answer to data
conservation would seem to be the internet. Servers
can go down or will need upgrading, but in theory,
information on the internet will last forever.
Kept on standalone computers or on
disks in a shoe box data from sites will be of less
use to tomorrow's archaeologists than if the site had
not been excavated in the first place.
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