Wall St. Journal: Tomorrow’s historians of science are going to have a hard time. And today’s archivists are going crazy with the overload.
One just knows that, with nearly every move in every laboratory in the world noted in computer records and emails and prepublication sites, not to mention tweets and gigabytes of raw on server data banks, in principle the progress of science has never been as well recorded as now.
That’s in principle. The WS Journal’s Robert Lee Hotz describes in his column today the actual nightmare of overload, of constantly changing software to read it, of deteriorating media from reel-to-reel tapes to thumbdrives, and of barely-searchable oceans of info in twitter, YouTube, FAcebook, email, and other varieties of what some call eManuscripts. He writes the paradox this way: Never have so many people generated so much digital data or been able to lose so much of it so quickly. This site had a post not long ago on news of the heroic effort it took to find software able to revive some of the original, high-res photos by US spacecraft as they circled the Moon in the Sixties. That, it seems, was just a hint of what is happening to the non-paper trail of science and technology all over the world. Just think: What would YOU do with a floppy disk that may once have run on your rich, late uncle’s Commodore 64 or Osborne 1 and you just pulled from where it was hidden under a dusty file drawer and is labelled only, “Vital: Don’t destroy!”
As Hotz observes, this ephemeral Everest of data and its fragility has been a hot topic among curators, archivists, and historians for a decade or more. But it is getting worse. Not only are the software and other conventions for reading data changing all the time, but now some machines, like the LHC project, generate information so fast there is hardly any way to store it all … at all. He offers some hope – a digital device that in theory will hold data for a billion years. Hope the reader lasts that long.
-CP
