Comments on: Preserving (the memory of) documents

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 10:19:19 +0000

You say “Preserving the Declaration of Independence is easy; preserving meeting notes is hard”. Surely the problem is preserving the media not the actual information. Even with nitrogen and low lights the document will eventually degrade though it might take thousands of years. On the other hand your photograph of the Rosetta disk will probably be archived many times somewhere on the internet and may even exist at the end of history. I have fossil stromatolites from the period of the first unicelluar life on earth 2 billion years ago. “Information” can exist easily that long but the problem is that we have almost no power to select what will remain and what will be lost – even if it is the Rosetta Stone or the Declaration of Independence.

By: John

John — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:20:09 +0000

I suppose the Rosetta disk is optimized for a different kind of search. They want to maximize the chances of someone being able to understand the purpose of the disk, not the maximize the speed at which someone in our time can find things. Finding this disk in the future might be something like discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, a discovery that took decades to process.

By: MFH

MFH — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:03:38 +0000

Trying to browse the Rosetta disc on-line made me aware that the problem (at least in out short-term version) is not that much to simply /preserve/ data, but also to /find/ what you are looking for in your archive. While I don’t /loose/ my documents, I’m unable to /find/ a given one – unless it’s in a more or less well structured archive which is “universally” accessible (from home, office, and on travel…) and can contain “everything”.
Back to the Rosetta disc, I was even unable to find a text in a given language (say, German). Actually, I even did not succeed in location the sector “Europe”. (Hoping for alphabetical order, after “Africa” and “Asia” I ran into “Oceania”… ?)

By: MFH

MFH — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:11:52 +0000

I like that idea… for now, the best I found is to keep /all/ in /one/ place: google docs… hoping that this service stays alive for some time… and thinking about how to make backups in an efficient way…

By: How to preserve documents — The Endeavour

How to preserve documents — The Endeavour — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:29:00 +0000

[...] conversation at work this morning inspired a post on the Reproducible Ideas blog about preserving documents. Physically preserving documents may be the easy part. Keeping alive the memory that the documents [...]