Digital Dark Age
Definition
Digital decay is a term used to describe the loss of formatting or accessibility of a digital artifact. Examples include tapes, microfiche, VHS, CD-ROMs and the sourcing of the equipment required to play or run them. Much of the information sent back and forth between humanity is now digital. It now resides in electric pulses instead of entrenched into stone. This data, if not kept alive, will decay into nothingness.
In Escaping the Digital Dark Age, Stuart Brand points out that "Information lives in two major dimensions - space and time", but that while "the space dimension for data will keep exploding...the time dimension is shrinking".[1]
Information keeps transferring itself into different formats.
Former University of California, Berkeley librarian Peter Layman points out, "When we know a book is important, we...tell a publisher: print it on acid-free paper. And with decent library air-conditioning it will last 500. years If you want to preserve something else, like a newspaper, microfilm it. We know there is a 500-year life to microfilm properly cared for. But what do we do with digital documents? What we do today is we refresh them every time there's a change in technology-or every 18 months, whichever comes first. This is an expensive approach! We need a digital equivalent to microfilm, a 500-year solution."[2]
This issue lead Supercomputer designer Danny Hillis to suggest the possibility that our era might "be a maddening blank to future historians--a Dark Age--because nearly all of our art, science, news, and other records are being created and stored on media that we know can't outlast even our own lifetimes".[3]
Related Reading
Preservation in the Digital World. Paul Conway. Head, Preservation Department, Yale University Library. March 1996 http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/conway2/
