Digital decay
03/20/10 07:50 Filed in: books | publishing
The
New York Times
has an
intriguing piece on how hard it is to archive
digital materials: Electronically
produced drafts, correspondence and editorial
comments, sweated over by contemporary poets,
novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately
just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on
floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which
degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free
paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the
relentless march of technology can mean that the
older equipment and software that can make sense
of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist
anymore.