[LINK] Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge

[Brendan Scott]

On 04/08/2010 10:22 AM, Kim Holburn wrote:
> 
> On 2010/Apr/07, at 10:16 PM, Brendan Scott wrote:
> 
>> On 04/06/2010 10:58 PM, Kim Holburn wrote:
>>> I found an article in New Scientist (30 Jan 2010) on a subject we  
>>> have
>>> discussed before here.  How long our mounting cloud of digital data
>>> will last.  Compared with say Babylonian cuniform tablets from 3500
>>> years ago the answer is not long.   They have a chart:
>>> Flash memory: 10 Years
>>> Magnetic tape: about 20 years
>>> Rewritable CDs and DVDs: 7 years
>>> Most CD-R and DVD+R, DVD-R, audio CD and Movie DVDs: 26 years
>>> Special gold CD-R: 100 years
>>> Hard disks: no-one knows.
>>>
>>> And that's assuming we have the ability to read them then.  Reading
>>> media made in old drives is not necessarily easy at all.  Less easy  
>>> if
>>> the drives are not available even less easy if no engineers familiar
>>> with them are still alive.  Maybe our digital society is just
>>> evanescent.
>>>
>>> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527451.300-digital-doomsday-the-end-of-knowledge.html
>>
>> What this doesn't take account of is that a hard disk is somewhat  
>> more reproducible than a cuneiform tablet. That the medium does not  
>> survive is different from the massage not surviving.
> 
> Huh?  My seven year old daughter might be able to reproduce a  
> cuneiform tablet by pressing it into playdough and making a copy.   I,  
> on the other hand, have a hard disk here that has given up the ghost,  
> after maybe 2 years of working.  You are welcome to try and reproduce  
> any scrap of information in it.

We don't have original manuscripts for lots of works, but we still have the works (I am told that pre-Socratics only wrote fragments). The loss of particular copies is beside the point. In some respects at least some information is more resilient these days. 

In fact, the main barrier to digital preservation may not be media, but copyright, in that it impedes redundancy and provides incentives to withhold publication. 

There is a side issue in that easy reproduction detracts from one particular copy or version being considered canonical.  What is a citation after Wikipedia?