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>From Ian Winship, University of Northumbria. [log in to unmask])
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The September 1999 issue of First Monday (volume 4, number 9) includes:
E-Mail and Potential Loss to Future Archives and Scholarship or The Dog
that Didn't Bark
by Susan S. Lukesh
A pattern has emerged in starting presentations on the preservation of
electronic materials: Disaster! In 1975, the U.S. Census Bureau discovered
that only two computers on earth can still read the 1960 census. The
computerized index to a million Vietnam War records was entered on a hybrid
motion picture film carrier that cannot be read. The bulk of the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration's research since 1958 is threatened
because of poor storage. These tales are akin to Jorge Luis Borges's short
story in which the knowledge of the world is concentrated in one mammoth
computer - and the key is lost.
The essential question for the Information Age may well be how to save the
electronic memory.
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_9/lukesh/
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