[TriLUG] Safest long-term media

[Aaron Joyner]

With a wife who has a Masters in Library Science from UNC, and
strongly considered being an archivist, we've had many an interesting
discussion about the particularly ephemeral nature of the digital
information society is now generating.  I'll side-step the "chiseled
in stone vs perpetually checksumming 3 live copies on 3 different
servers in each of two facilities on separate continents" aspect of
the debate.

I find it particularly ironic that as we come into the "Information
Age", the *percentage* of information available to anthropologists in
2,000 years vs what's floating around the public consciousness right
now is likely to be substantially lower than any time in previous
recorded history.  More information will probably be available from
the 20th century than from the 19th, and more still from the 21st, but
the percentage available will decline only because of the dramatic
increase in information production and storage.

The fact that we're having this discussion, and as a group, we're
pretty far from archivists or anthropologists, is a good sign.  That
the average joe is much more likely to care about and have an opinion
about information preservation bodes well for our collective futures.

Aaron S. Joyner


On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Scott G. Hall<ScottGHall at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> Scott Lambdin wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Peter Neilson wrote:
>>>
>>> Marks chiseled in stone last for millennia,
>>
>> There are some who believe that there is a missing 4th section to the
>> Rosetta stone which consisted of chiseled bar code.
>
> Would that be a two-dimensional bar-code?
>
> --
> Scott G. Hall
> Raleigh, NC, USA
> ScottGHall at BellSouth.Net
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