Techdirt: Will Digital Archiving Difficulties Wipe Out Important Elements Of Our History?

Techdirt: Will Digital Archiving Difficulties Wipe Out Important Elements Of Our History?em>
Even if you can store the data perfectly forever, without the right applications, it's meaningless. Matt Sullivan writes in with yet another article on the topic, this time from Popular Mechanics, that suggests we could be facing a "digital ice age" as plenty of data from this era of history are lost to bad archiving capabilities.

(Original article noted above is from Dec, 2006 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine.)

Well....yes. D'uh, I guess in a way. See, this issue apparently is now getting play in the slightly more popular press (I hedge and hate to take out the qualifier of "slightly" since PM is not exactly TIME or Newsweek in terms of its scope or readership...but is obviously vastly further reaching than all the academic stuff). And it's a known and researched topic in the archival, library and information science fields for quite some time. Apparently we've just been preaching to the choir and talking amongst ourselves until now. And even now, it's probably not someone from one of those disciplines doing the writing here. But he does reference some of the most famous examples of digital data obsolescence-- including the Navy's Aircraft Carrier, Nimitz.

Perhaps moral of this story/rant is to do research that has practical applications, work with practitioners on the research, and then get results published in both academic publications (cause I gotta go out and work on tenure someday, somehow) and more popular ones, outside my own field.