Protecting the digital past for posterity is problematic

Losing personal computer files can be upsetting. But failing to protect academic, government, or corporate data could erase irreplaceable pieces of history, says Francine Berman. She co-chairs a newly formed panel of experts tasked to ask how the world can protect its digital past, and answer a more nagging question: Who's going to pay for it?

“It’s hard to read the information on floppy disks these days,” says Berman, who is director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. “Very few people still have the drives. It’s hard to play LPs. They were everywhere only a decade ago. But now many people can’t read them.” And if diskettes or vinyl aren’t kept in the right environment, it won’t matter if people have the right drives. The disks will decay. The records will warp.

“It’s the great challenge of the Informa­tion Age,” she says, and a problem that her Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation will explore over the next two years. Read more in The Christian Science Monitor online.