The space agency NASA has already lost digital records sent back by its early probes, and in 1995 the US government come close to losing a vast chunk of national census data, thanks to the obsolescence of its data retrieval technology. Betamax video players, 20-centimetre and 12.5 — centimetre computer disks, and eight-track music cartridges have all become redundant, making it impossible to access records stored on them. Data stored on the 7.5 centimetre-disks used in the pioneering Amstrad word-processor is now equally inaccessible. Our digital heritage - only a few decades old — is already endangered, as broadcaster Loyd Grossman pointed out last week. 'Last year marked the 30th anniversary of email, but it is salutary that we do not have the first e-mail message and no knowledge of its contents,' he said at the launch of the Digital Preservation Coalition. Saving Domesday Project is viewed as one of the coalition's top priorities. It was to be the mother of all time capsules, filled with images and sounds defining life in Britain in 1986 - when hill farmers struggled to cope with Chernobyl nuclear fallout and Maradona beat England with the 'hand of God'. Thousands of schoolchildren helped record festivals, events and details of ordinary life, which were stored on 12-inch laser discs. They contained more than 2,50,000 place names, 25,000 maps, 50,000 pictures, 3,000 data sets, 60 minutes of moving pictures, and an unknown number of words. Around a million persons contributed. The trouble was that the discs could only be viewed using a special BBC Micro computer, which cost about $ 7,000 to buy. Few were purchased, and just handful were left in existence. 'The information on this incredible historical object will soon disappear forever,' Grossman said last week. In a bid to rescue the project, Paul Wheatley has begun work on Camileon, a program aimed at recovering the data on the Domesday discs. 'We have got a couple of rather scratchy pairs of discs, and we are confident we will eventually be able to read all their images, maps and text,' he said. 'Unfortunately, we don't know what we will do after that. We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years. 'That means we have to find a way to
emulate this data, in other words to turn into a form that can be used
no matter what is the computer format of the future. That is the real
goal of this project.' It won't be an easy task. Jeff Rothenberg of the
Rand Corporation, one of the world's experts on data preservation,
points out: 'There is currently no demonstrably viable technical
solution to this problem yet if it is not solved, our increasingly
digital heritage is in grave risk of being lost.' — ONS |