[SIGCIS-Members] Google boss warns of 'forgotten century' with email and photos at risk
Allan Olley
allan.olley at utoronto.ca
Fri Feb 13 18:03:23 PST 2015
Hi,
At the risk of being sidelined I too have long been intrigued by
the various attempts to recover the 1986 virtual Domesday book files and
images.
Its detailed in the source that Brian linked to that there were
multiple attempts to make available the materials (at least 3) including
the CAMiLEON emulator project that succeeded in creating an emulator, but
seems to have ultimately not been how access has been preserved.
It is worth emphasizing this website
http://www.atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html by Andy Finney (who helped
produce the 1986 discs and helped recover the images and preserve them in
a more current video format) details many of the issues in this including
some information on subsequent developments such as the Domesday Reloaded
project which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the original by making
some of the information available and undertaking an update (the original
project involved a large component of public participation that was
revived here) http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday/story . I'm not sure
but my sense is that the Reloaded project required or made use of some
reingineering and preservation beyond what the other three projects had
done.
Many intriguing twists and turns in that one.
As an incurable pack rat trying to keep track of my 17 year old
e-mails and the like is my most direct and sustained experience with the
problems of digital preservation. If enough energy and time is expended
the problems don't seem insurmountable, but that is the rub.
I would point out that even hard records get thrown out and lost
to history with a sharp regularity and so I would suspect preservation
in general is a perennial problem and question of priorities and
resources.
--
Yours Truly,
Allan Olley, PhD
http://individual.utoronto.ca/fofound/
On Fri, 13 Feb 2015, adam spring wrote:
> Very good point. There was a good write up in the Guardian from 2002 about trying
> to recover data from Doomsday:
> http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/mar/03/research.elearning
> http://cool.conservation-us.org/coolaic/sg/emg/library/pdf/wheatley/Wheatley-EMG2
> 004.pdf
>
> On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 6:17 PM, Brian Randell <brian.randell at newcastle.ac.uk>
> 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
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of
> SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are
> not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at
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>
>
>
> --
> Adam P. Spring
>
> Skype: adampspring
>
>
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