[PLUG-TALK] Archival Storage of Digital Data

[Rich Shepard]

   For the past year or so a lot of attention among the user community and
the rest of the world has focused on the ODF open document format standard
for data. Without getting into discussion about this, it's certainly a good
idea to have a uniform XML standard for storing all sorts of data so that
it's readable decades in the future. (As an interesting aside, compare the
ODF with the US government's SDTS for digital spatial data, created about a
decade ago, that's so complex and convoluted it took years for anyone to
come up with filters to translate those data to formats understood by
available GIS software.)

   Regardless of the data format, I started to wonder if any group within the
FOSS community is looking at storage media for all these data.

   Over the past 30-40 years we've had paper tape, 80-column Hollerith cards,
1/2" 9-track open reel magnetic tape, 8" 5.25" 3.5" floppy disks, WORM
disks, Cauzin paper strips, IOMEGA ZIP drives, cdrom, dvd, USB flash memory,
and probably many more I've not mentioned. What's happened to all the data on
the ones that are no longer in use? We've seen several calls on the PLUG
mail list for 1/2" 9-track tape drives, and I'm sure others have hunted for
the physical resource to read old data.

   Seems to me that regardless of the format of the data, the physical medium
on which it's stored needs equal or greater attention. It is well accepted
by those who know and care that paper records are the only proven long-term
archival storage medium.

   I'm sure that some of you have thought deep thoughts about this issue and
probably have (or are) working on solutions. I'm curious to learn what
progress we've made in this important aspect of the information age. After
all, we have records from the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. But, in
100 years will there be any existing record of the Information Age?

Rich

-- 
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |    The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.(TM)    |            Accelerator
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517      Fax: 503-667-8863