The Myth of Doomed Data

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: digital preservation represents a significant technical challenge, but it’s first and foremost a social challenge.

Simson Garfinkel, whose work I’ve followed, says much the same in the current issue of the MIT Technology Review: “The Myth of Doomed Data.” His piece deftly deconstructs the much ballyhooed example of the Domesday Book, which was originally digitized in the mid-1980s on 12” video disks—a format now well and truly extinct. The punch-line irony is of course that the original, handwritten on parchment leaves in 1086, is still perfectly legible. The digitized version, meanwhile, was painstakingly rescued by a team of dedicated research scientists—at great cost—only a decade and a half later. So digital preservation must be a fool’s errand, right? Wrong. Here’s Garfinkel:

To be sure, this has all been an expensive and time-consuming process. But it has been done, proving that the process is possible. Not all digital material is worth preserving—most, in fact, is not. But Domesday was worth preserving and, as a result, it has been.

And:

Indeed, for every Domesday Project that has lost its data to proprietary equipment and file formats, it is easy to point to another project for which information created decades ago is still available. The Internet “Request For Comment” (RFC) series, started back in the 1970s, is readable on practically every computer on the planet today because the RFCs were stored in plain ASCII text. Similarly, you can download images sent back from the Voyager space probes 30 years ago and view them on your PC because NASA stored those pictures as bitmaps—pixel-by-pixel copies of the images without any compression whatsoever. Some argue that it’s impossible to look into the future and determine which of today’s formats will survive and which will go the way of the VP 415. Poppycock! As a society we have a very good understanding of what will make one file format endure while another one is likely to perish. The key to survival is openness and documentation.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: digital preservation represents a significant technical challenge, but it’s first and foremost a social challenge.