What I am Reading

David Pogue, the New York Times technology writer seems to have just discovered what librarians and archivists have known for a long time. In a recent interview with Dag Spicer, the Curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, he finds out that digital storage devices have a remarkably short lifetime and that data can be lost if simply dumped on to a magnetic or optical digital storage medium. He should have talked to an archivist. Data Rot, as he terms it, is why we still put essential information on microfilm and store it in salt mines or why we print things off on to acid free paper and store the paper in environmentally sound conditions … and on and on. Or, it is why we spend a lot of time migrating digital data from one storage medium to another with multiple back-ups.  Still … he did serve to popularize the problem.