Are We Losing Our Memory? or The Museum of Obsolete Technology

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brian Randell <Brian.Randell () ncl ac uk>
Date: March 22, 2009 5:50:16 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Are We Losing Our Memory? or The Museum of Obsolete Technology

Hi Dave:

For IP if you wish.

Cheers

Brian

----


Are We Losing Our Memory? or The Museum of Obsolete Technology

by Alexander Stille

Running out of time at the National Archives.

In a temperature-controlled laboratory in the bowels of the vast new  
National Archives building outside Washington - nearly two million  
square feet of futuristic steel and glass construction - an engineer  
cranks up an old Thomas A. Edison phonograph. A cylindrical disc  
begins to turn and from its large wooden horn we suddenly hear the  
scratchy oompah-pah of a marching band striking up a tune at a Knights  
of Columbus parade in July of 1902.

Nearby sits an ancestor of the modern reel-to-reel tape recorder; it's  
the very machine that recorded President Harry Truman's famous whistle- 
stop speeches as he traveled the country by train during his legendary  
come-from-behind victory in the election of 1948. Instead of capturing  
sound on magnetic tape, the device stored its data on coils of thin  
steel wire as fine as fishline. Now some of the wire has rusted, and  
it occasionally snaps when it is played back through the machine.

This laboratory, in the Department of Special Media Preservation, is a  
kind of museum of obsolete technology where Archives technicians try  
to tease information out of modern media that have long vanished from  
circulation. But the laboratory is more than a curious rag-and-bone  
shop of technologies past; in many ways, it offers a cautionary vision  
of the future. The problem of technological obsolescence - of fading  
words and images locked in odd-looking, out-of-date gizmos - is an  
even bigger problem for the computer age than for the new media  
produced in the first half of the 20th century.

One of the great ironies of the information age is that, while the  
late twentieth century will undoubtedly have recorded more data than  
any other period in history, it will also almost certainly have lost  
more information than any previous era. A study done in 1996 by the  
Archives concluded that, at current levels, it would take  
approximately 120 years to transfer the backlog of nontextual material  
(photographs, videos, film, audiotapes, and microfilm) to a more  
stable format. "And in quite a few cases, we're talking about media  
that are expected to last about 20 years," said Charles Mayn, the head  
of the laboratory. Decisions about what to keep and what to discard  
will be made by default, as large portions will simply deteriorate  
beyond the point of viability.

. . .

Potentially, the computer age appears to offer the historian's Holy  
Grail of infinite memory and of instant, permanent access to virtually  
limitless amounts of information. But as the pace of technological  
change increases, so does the speed at which each new generation of  
equipment supplants the last. "Right now, the half-life of most  
computer technology is between three and five years," said Steve  
Puglia, a preservation and imaging specialist whose laboratory is just  
down the hall from Mayn's. In the 1980s, the Archives stored 250,000  
documents and images on optical disks - the cutting edge of new  
technology at the time. "I'm not sure we can play them," said Puglia,  
explaining that they depend on computer software and hardware that is  
no longer on the market.

In fact, there appears to be a direct relationship between the newness  
of technology and its fragility. A librarian at Yale University, Paul  
Conway, has created a graph going back to ancient Mesopotamia that  
shows that while the quantity of information being saved has increased  
exponentially, the durability of media has decreased almost as  
dramatically. The clay tablets that record the laws of ancient Sumer  
are still on display in museums around the world. Many medieval  
illuminated manuscripts written on animal parchment still look as if  
they were painted and copied yesterday. Paper correspondence from the  
Renaissance is faded by still in good condition while books printed on  
modern acidic paper are already turning to dust. Black-and-white  
photographs may last a couple of centuries, while most color  
photographs become unstable within 30 or 40 years. Videotapes  
deteriorate much more quickly than does traditional movie film -  
generally lasting about 20 years. And the latest generation of digital  
storage tape is considered safe for about ten years, after which it  
should be copied to avoid loss of data.

. . .

In theory, computer technology should be more helpful with the storage  
of textual documents than with the audio and video records of Mayn's  
dynamic media lab. But so far, it has only compounded the problem. In  
1989, a public interest group trying to get information about the Iran- 
contra scandal successfully sued the White House to prevent it from  
destroying any electronic records. The result is that all federal  
agencies must now preserve all their computer files and electronic  
mail. Because government offices use different kinds of computers,  
software programs, and formats, just recovering this material has  
proved to be a logistical nightmare. It took the National Archives two  
and a half years (and its entire electronic records staff) just to  
make a secure copy of all the electronic records of the Reagan White  
House. And it may take years more to make most of them intelligible.  
"They are gibberish as they currently stand," said Fynette Eaton, who  
worked at the Archives' Center of Electronic Records before moving  
over to the Smithsonian Institution.

The beauty of digital technology is that it reduces everything to a  
series of zeroes and ones - a simple, seemingly universal mathematical  
language - but unless one has the software that gives meaning to those  
zeroes and ones, the data is meaningless. The problem of deciphering  
Egyptian hieroglyphs may look like child's play compared with  
recovering all the information on the hundreds of major software  
programs that have been discarded during the astonishing  
transformations of the computer revolution.

The losses from the first decades of the digital age are likely to be  
considerable. The federal government, with its multitude of  
departments, agencies, and offices, is a dense thicket of incompatible  
computer languages and formats - many of them old and obsolete. Many  
of the records of the National Military Command Center are stored in a  
database management system (known as NIPS) that IBM no longer supports  
and that the National Archives has difficulty translating into  
readable form. The Agent Orange Task Force has been unable to use  
herbicide records written in NIPS format.

. . .

Full story at:
http://www.lostmag.com/issue3/memory.php
--
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell () ncl ac uk   PHONE = +44 191 222 7923
FAX = +44 191 222 8232  URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell




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