Japan’s Crises, and its ramifications on digital preservation
The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis in Japan may have far-reaching cultural and history-recording effects worldwide… possibly exacerbating a digital dark age.
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Your tweets, saved for eternity
With over 12 billion 140-character messages and growing, Twitter has exploded onto the social networking scene since the first Tweet ever posted roughly fours ago. Those tiny text-based messages add up: That’s an estimated 1.5 terabaytes of data, and growing! It looks like the Library of Congress sees the social impact and significance of the […]
NY Times Article on the realities and costs of Born Digital preservation
The New York Times today published an article that reflects some of the challenges of preserving born digital content – that is, documents, data and other content that has been created digitally, on a computer or electronic device, and for which there is no physical original (such as on paper). In particular, they highlight the […]
Reel2Bytes: Digitizing 1950s-era analog tape
Of all the work I do, I think dealing with older formats, and just figuring out how they work, is the most interesting aspect. A few weeks ago, a stack of old open real tapes arrived, along with a similar-vintage tape player. The recordings were done in the early 1950s, as part of a project […]
New Scientist article on “Digital Doomsday”
One of the topics I like to bring up in the discussion of preserving digital data is the idea of a Digital Dark Age… the notion of a period in our historic knowledge that ends up getting lost due to a failure to plan and preserve our early digital content. The New Scientist, however, recently […]