NYTimes is carrying a nice story on archival of digital-born material citing the example of Salman Rushdie’s work on display at Emory University. Though the 18 gigabytes of data they have on 4 Apple computers contains lots of useful data for future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks. The problem that archivers are facing is that the “born-digital” materials – those initially created in electronic form – are much more complicated and costly to preserve that what anyone would anticipate.
Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.
Imagine having a record but no record player.
All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible.
We recommend you to visit Born-Digital on Wikipedia and read the article Part of Our Culture is Born Digital -On Eorts to Preserve it for Future Generations (PDF) by Andreas Rauber, Andreas Aschenbrenner – Department of Software Technology and Interactive Systems – Vienna University of Technology.
Via @ananny – Thanks
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