Digital fire, Digital Ice

Reading this article http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/photo.html
brings to mind the poem about the world ending "in Fire, or in Ice."

It's becoming more and more obvious to me that we're about half way into a period that history will note as "the time no one knows much about." More and more of our incidental records - - newspapers, correspondence, photographs, are being kept on volatile media (color snapshots rather than silver prints, acid pulp paper instead of rag stock, and of course digital data on unknown media encoded in unremembered format.) It's a bit like losing all of your family's memorabilia to a house fire, only this inferno burns slowly and silently, and may take away a whole generation's memory.

Librarians and preservationists are working on solutions, both technological (periodic media conversions) and legal (archival waivers of copyright and DRM restrictions.) But, it's a big job and it's funded purely out of the petty cash box, relatively speaking.

The more subtle amnesia may come if by some whimsy or miracle the bulk of those bits survive, leaving an unsolvable needle in the haystack problem. A little back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that I'm sitting on a bit more than a Terabyte of personal data, mostly in the form of photographic negatives, vinyl records, CDs, and paper. I think I can find a photo from thirty years ago; it would be in a box upstairs, and there's probably a contact sheet to simplify my search. Finding my expense records for eight years ago would be a whole lot harder, and an email from three jobs (and similar number of PCs) ago nearly impossible. I've got the data, but as it becomes more digital it becomes less accessible, freezing me out.

Indexing it all gets harder over time, too. It's bad enough to go through old photo albums with my mom, asking "what's that?" and getting slightly different answers each time. What happens when that's multiplied exponentially? What if there is so much data that there isn't enough eyeballs to look at everything before its memory fades beyond recollection?

Maybe that's what pays the way for all of those folks in the Star Trek universe. All that casual walking around the flight deck of space ships is their "off time." After that, they have to put in a sweaty eight hours sorting old credit card receipts, annotating digital images of people waiving in front of long-demolished buildings, and reverse-engineering technical manuals for Betamax VCRs, and 8-track tape players.