History: We're Losing It
By Arlyn Tobias Gajilan -
Newsweek.com
They told us digital data would last forever. They lied. How do we
save the past before it all disappears?
First-time parents Michele and Steve Brigham of New York can't imagine life
without their 6-year-old daughter, Courtney—or the family camcorder and camera. Like
millions of other parents, the Brighams have videotaped and photographed their daughter's
first breaths, first steps, first birthday and dozens of other events in a rapidly growing
library of more than 1,800 minutes of videotape and 3,000 photographs. "It may seem
excessive," admits Michele. "But I think Courtney will appreciate it all when
she grows up." Unfortunately, she might have nothing to look at. By the time Courtney
turns 30, sunlight may have faded most of her color childhood photos, and in the off
chance that the tiny VHS-C videotapes featuring her many firsts survive decades of heat
and humidity, there probably won't be a machine to play them back on.
Home videos and snapshots aren't all that are at risk. Librarians and archivists
warn we're losing vast amounts of important scientific and historical material because of
disintegration or obsolescence. Already gone is up to 20 percent of the data collected on
Jet Propulsion Laboratory computers during NASA's 1976 Viking mission to Mars. Also at
risk are 4,000 reels of census data stored in a format so obscure that archivists doubt
they'll be able to recover it. By next year, 75 percent of federal government records will
be in electronic form, and no one is sure how much of it will be readable in as little as
10 years. "The more technologically advanced we get, the more fragile we
become," says Abby Smith of the Council on Library and Information Resources.
For years, computer scientists said the ones and zeros of digital data would
stick around forever. They were wrong. Tests by the National Media Lab, a Minnesota-based
government and industry consortium, found that magnetic tapes might last only a decade,
depending on storage conditions. The fate of floppy disks, videotape and hard drives is
just as bleak. Even the CD-ROM, once touted as indestructible, is proving vulnerable to
stray magnetic fields, oxidation, humidity and material decay. The fragility of
electronic media isn't the only problem. Much of the hardware and software configurations
needed to tease intelligible information from preserved disks and tapes are disappearing
in the name of progress. "Technology is moving too quickly," says Charlie Mayn,
who runs the Special Media Preservation lab at the National Archives.
He speaks from experience. In the 1980s, the Archives transferred some 200,000
documents and images onto optical disks, which are in danger of becoming indecipherable
because the system archivists used is no longer on the market. "Any technology can go
the way of eight-track and Betamax," says Smith, whose own dissertation is trapped on
an obsolete 5e-inch floppy. "Information doesn't have much of a chance, unless you
keep a museum of tape players and PCs around." That may not be such a farfetched
idea. Mayn's temperature-controlled lab in the bowels of the National Archives houses many
machines once used to record history. In one room, archivists are resurrecting the 1948
whistle-stop oratory of President Harry Truman; the give-'em-hell speeches were recorded
on spools of thin steel wire, an ancestor of reel-to-reel tape recordings. Though
some of the wires have rusted and snap during playback, Mayn and his team are busy
"migrating," or transferring, what they're able to recover onto more stable
modern media.
Unfortunately, migration isn't a perfect solution. "Sometimes not all the
data makes the trip," says Smith. Recently the Food and Drug Administration said that
some pharmaceutical companies were finding errors as they transferred drug-testing data
from Unix to Windows NT operating systems. In some instances, the errors resulted in
blood-pressure numbers that were randomly off by up to eight digits.
So what's to be done? "That's a question no one really has an answer
for," says Smith. A good way to start is to separate the inconsequential from the
historic, and save on simple formats. Making those decisions won't be easy, especially for
families like the Brighams, who continue to roll video on their young daughter. "We
don't want to miss anything," says Michele.
Unfortunately, they may have to.
Newsweek International, July 26, 1999
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