Via BBC News -
The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a "ticking time bomb", the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned.
Natalie Ceeney said society faced the possibility of "losing years of critical knowledge" because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.
She was speaking at the launch of a partnership with Microsoft to ensure the Archives could read old formats.
Microsoft's UK head Gordon Frazer warned of a looming "digital dark age".
He added: "Unless more work is done to ensure legacy file formats can be read and edited in the future, we face a digital dark hole."
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The National Archives, which holds 900 years of written material, has more than 580 terabytes of data - the equivalent of 580,000 encyclopaedias - in older file formats that are no longer commercially available.
Ms Ceeney said: "If you put paper on shelves, it's pretty certain it is going to be there in a hundred years.
"If you stored something on a floppy disc just three or four years ago, you'd have a hard time finding a modern computer capable of opening it."
"Digital information is in fact inherently far more ephemeral than paper," warned Ms Ceeney.
She added: "The pace of software and hardware developments means we are living in the world of a ticking time bomb when it comes to digital preservation.
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I have been thinking about this problem for quite a bit now..and it is really shocking when you think about it. We are capable of reading ancient Egyptian stone tablets...but are unable to read information stored in documents created only years ago.
Our own desire for faster access to information has driven a push for new and better technology...but in the end, it is important to remember why we made all this technology?
It was all for the "information"....so lets not let technology blind us from that fact.
We must all work together to protect our information and our history for the generations to come.
One of the biggest reasons for this is that of proprietary formats. This includes older Microsoft formats that are NOT readable by Office 2007.
ReplyDeletePart of their solution is to use Microsoft's XML, which in and of itself is proprietary to Microsoft.
Quite honestly I don't understand why these institutions that are suppose to preserve this information don't store it in a documented format that is not proprietary (think: TEXT!).