[SIGCIS-Members] Google boss warns of 'forgotten century' with email and photos at risk

Ian S. King isking at uw.edu
Fri Feb 13 08:45:34 PST 2015


I'm glad that he mentioned the policy changes that are needed to keep
archivists and librarians out of jail for doing their jobs.  :-)

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 4:47 AM, Matthew Kirschenbaum <
mkirschenbaum at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm gonna assume this is "news" only because Vint Cerf said it. Rather
> than the sky is falling, it's too bad he didn't use the occasion to
> spotlight work that archivists are actually doing.
>
>
>
> On Friday, February 13, 2015, Brian Randell <brian.randell at newcastle.ac.uk>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi:
>>
>> From The Guardian:
>>
>> > Digital material including key historical documents could be lost
>> forever because programs to view them will become defunct, says Vint Serf
>> >
>> > Piles of digitised material – from blogs, tweets, pictures and videos,
>> to official documents such as court rulings and emails – may be lost
>> forever because the programs needed to view them will become defunct,
>> Google’s vice-president has warned.
>> >
>> > Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future
>> historians, Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of
>> Science’s annual meeting in San Jose, California, warning that we faced a
>> “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century” through what he called
>> “bit rot”, where old computer files become useless junk.
>> >
>> > Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future
>> historians because the electronic files that describe the story will not
>> run on their computers.
>> >
>> > Cerf pushed for the development of “digital vellum” to preserve old
>> software and hardware so that out-of-date files could be recovered no
>> matter how old they are.
>> >
>> > “When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily
>> lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email,
>> people’s tweets, and all of the world wide web, it’s clear that we stand to
>> lose an awful lot of our history,” he said.
>> >
>> > “We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve
>> them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can
>> still be rendered far into the future,” he added.
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> Full story at:
>>
>>
>> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-boss-warns-forgotten-century-email-photos-vint-cerf
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Brian Randell
>>
>> --
>> School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne,
>> NE1 7RU, UK
>> EMAIL = Brian.Randell at ncl.ac.uk   PHONE = +44 191 208 7923
>> FAX = +44 191 208 8232  URL =
>> http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Matthew Kirschenbaum
> Associate Professor of English
> Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
> (MITH)
> University of Maryland
> 301-405-8505 or 301-314-7111 (fax)
> http://mkirschenbaum.net and @mkirschenbaum on Twitter
>
> Track Changes tumblr: http://trackchangesbook.tumblr.com/
>
>
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-- 
Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS
Ph.D. Candidate
The Information School
University of Washington

An optimist sees a glass half full. A pessimist sees it half empty. An
engineer sees it twice as large as it needs to be.
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