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Re: looking for examples of what i'm calling "digital transience"

  • Subject: Re: looking for examples of what i'm calling "digital transience"
  • From: "Brenda J. Butler" <bjb [ at ] sourcerer [ dot ] ca>
  • Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 21:11:03 -0400
Librarians and archivists have written about this.  Long-standing
governments have needs in this area as well (must keep track of people
over generations).  (Just giving you areas you can search ... I
haven't read about these things in a long time so don't have
any specific documents to refer you to).

archive.org is an attempt to preserve some digital info - another
possiblel place to look for info on this topic.

bjb

On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 08:17:30AM -0400, Richard Guy Briggs wrote:
> On 2019-07-20 05:44, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > 
> >   good friend of mine is starting a research project, looking into
> > what i will call "digital transience" ... she is using a slightly
> > different term and would prefer i not use it for the time being.
> > 
> >   the idea is fairly obvious ... the danger of digital content
> > vanishing for any of a number of reasons: dropping support for
> > proprietary data formats, physical media (5 1/4" floppy drives, Zip
> > drives(?)) vanishing, link rot, entire site rot, and so on. so she's
> > interested in a couple things.
> > 
> >   first, just *general* contributors to the unexpected loss of what
> > might be important corporate digital data. but also, real-life
> > examples of things like this -- the one that leaps to mind is the
> > recent microsoft debacle involving ebooks protected by DRM:
> > 
> > https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-ebook-apocalypse-drm/
> > 
> >   i think that, of the two topics above, she's more interested in
> > actual examples of significant loss of digital data, not through any
> > sort of malice, but by accident or unforeseen developments in hardware
> > or data formats that suddenly cause a catastrophic loss of
> > information.
> > 
> >   i've already started a list, but i'm open to as many examples as i
> > can collect. thoughts?
> 
> This is a pretty interesting topic.
> 
> This has happenned with every sort of media in the past...  Though stone
> tablets are a bit more durable than 8-tracks and don't burn at 451
> degrees farenheiht...
> 
> This sounds like the kind of stuff that Russell McOrmond and Joseph
> Potvin would be interested in.  I'm sure you would start a lively
> discussion over on  ottawa-gosling [ at ] list [ dot ] goslingcommunity [ dot ] org
> 
> > rday
> 
> 	slainte mhath, RGB
> 
> --
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