Comments by "" (@BobSmith-dk8nw) on "Preserving the Past - How to keep old books alive in a digital age" video.

Yeah. There are a multitude of problems with all of this. One is the storage of the data files. One problem some financial institutions had with their back ups - was that as time went by - the equipment that could access the files - would go away. Here - there are companies that for a fee can - hopefully - transfer your data to another format. Another problem is that the media that data is stored on can degrade over time. People get the idea that once they've digitized or backed up data to something - that this something is going to last forever - and it's not. Online storage puts you at the mercy of whoever controls the servers. If they go under financially - their data files may go with them. Another factor here - is that if they have system failures - what is the status of their back ups? At one point in time there was an effort to digitize large numbers of books in print but I don't know what happened to that. Then there's access to the data. You have problems with Web Sites simply going away. There are sometimes automatic archives of these things but sometimes there is not. The point is - that there is a tremendous amount of effort that goes into not merely digitizing things - but - the access to them over time and the maintenance of the data and the systems it is stored on. One thing that should never be done - is to assume that, since the data is digitized - that it is not as important to preserve the original hard copies it came from. What we have today - compared to what I had when I was researching my Masters Thesis (literal CARD catalogs) is fantastic but the vast majority of the information out there - is NOT digitized and you can't use a search engine to look for it. The other thing about digitizing things - is that you have to have power to be able to access it - and not everyone does. I just saw a video the other day of the Rolling Black Outs in South Africa. Throughout History there have been catastrophic data losses - i.e. The Library of Alexandria ... Today we have the likes of Putin threatening the west with Nuclear Weapons and the fact that sooner or later - some big rock is going to plow into the planet if we don't do something about it before hand ... One thing to be said for using a Reed Stylus to write on little Clay Tablets (about the form factor of a mobile phone) was that they survived thousands of years in such as ancient basements until some Archeologists found them and learned how to read Cuneiform. i wonder about the survival of data captured or created today and it's ability to survive the destruction of it's civilization and the ravages of time the way those little Clay Tablets did. .
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