30 Dec 2005
National Archives' Digital Woes

As the proud owner of a pile of vinyl LP's, a rack of laser disc's and a few 5.25" floppys formatted to the Commodore 1541 drive, I can appreciate the problem here ...

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The National Archives, entrusted to preserve America's official history, will have to handle roughly 100 million emails from the Bush White House, up from 32 million during the Clinton years, according to the Wall Street Journal. 'The rapid adoption of electronic communications technology in the last decade has created a major crisis for the Archives,' the Journal reports. 'For one thing, the amount of data to be preserved has exploded in recent years, thanks to the proliferation of high-tech tools such as personal computers and wireless email devices such as BlackBerries. At the same time, technology is becoming obsolete so fast that electronic documents created today may not be legible on tomorrow's devices, the equivalent of trying to play an eight-track tape on an iPod.' The director of the Electronic Records Archives Program tells the Journal, 'We don't want to turn into a Cyber-Williamsburg, a place that keeps old technologies alive.'"

(link) [Slashdot]

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