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

Fri Feb 13 10:49:40 PST 2015

Henry, thanks for doing this.  As a reminder to all of us, many archivists,
computer scientists, and computer vendors and government agencies are hard
at work on this problem of preservation not just to keep we historians
happy, but for the functioning of society.  In the USA, for example, by
federal law all national agencies and offices MUST preserve their records,
corporations too because they need to defend themselves from lawsuits.  So
there are a lot of smart folks working on the problem.  Henry's pointers
are the tip of the iceberg.

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 12:32 PM, Henry Lowood <lowood at stanford.edu> wrote:

> Since we are sharing links to projects and reports:
> Don't forget Preserving Virtual Worlds:
> https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/17097  (Stanford, Illinois,
> MITH, RIT)
> And several links for this important report on preserving software and
> software development documentation, just out this week (Stanford, UCSC), a
> case study of the UCSC game project, Prom Week:
> Here's the blog post: http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2015/
> 02/preserving-cultural-software/ ‎
> Here's a Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/
> Games.Playable.UCSC/posts/898015030231262
> Here's a tweet: https://twitter.com/noahwf/status/565198816408633344
> Here's the UC repository link: http://www.escholarship.org/
> uc/item/0wg4w6b9
> Enjoy!
> Henry
>
>
>
> On 2/13/2015 10:17 AM, Brian Randell wrote:
>
>> Hi:
>>
>> The most challenging digital preservation project I personally know of
>> (though doubtless there are many more) was the project to rescue the BBC
>> Domesday Book Videodisks- see
>>
>>    http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/tna
>>
>> A cautionary remark from the concluding section of this account of the
>> project is: "The lesson of this digital preservation project is that if you
>> have enough time, individual skill, dedication and imagination then almost
>> anything is possible, provided that you don't leave it too late.”
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Brian
>>
>>
>> On 13 Feb 2015, at 17:49, Ian S. King <isking at uw.edu> wrote:
>>
>>  And at the University of Washington, I've worked on a Multi-Lifespan
>>> Information Systems project, the Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal.  This is
>>> a real-world application of design principles to support both the
>>> bit-integrity and authenticity of digital documents, in this case the
>>> audiovisual record of interviews with members of the International Criminal
>>> Tribunal - Rwanda formed in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
>>> Last year, I conducted maintenance on the archive and we learned a great
>>> deal about the challenges involved - publication pending.  :-)
>>>
>>> On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 8:50 AM, Len Shustek <len at shustek.com> wrote:
>>> At 03:07 AM 2/13/2015, Brian Randell wrote:
>>>
>>>> Digital material including key historical documents could be lost
>>>> forever because programs to view them will become defunct, says Vint Cerf
>>>>
>>> We've been beating that drum for a while at the Computer History Museum,
>>> starting with a short film for the general public called "Digital Dark Age"
>>> that we did in 2011 for our permanent "Revolution" exhibition.
>>> http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/325/2208
>>>
>>> The inspiration for that film was my discovery that modern versions of
>>> Powerpoint won't open presentations created by Powerpoint 1.0, which was
>>> released in 1990. In only twenty years, perfectly preserved bits were
>>> rendered useless.
>>>
>>> -- Len
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion
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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.
>>>
>>
>> --
>> 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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>
> --
> Henry Lowood
> Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;
>   Film & Media Collections
> HSSG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall
> Stanford University Libraries, Stanford CA 94305-6004
> 650-723-4602; lowood at stanford.edu; http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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-- 
James W. Cortada
Senior Research Fellow
Charles Babbage Institute
University of Minnesota
jcortada at umn.edu
608-274-6382
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