By: Arlyn Tobias Gajilan
July 12, 1999 ‑ Newsweek
First‑time parents Michele and Steve Brigham of New York can’t imagine life without
their 6‑year‑old daughter, Courtney‑or the family camcorder and
camera. Like millions of other parents, the Brighams have video‑taped and
photographed their daughter's first breaths, first steps, first birthday and
dozens of other events in a rapidly growing library of more than 1,800 minutes of
videotape and 3,000 photographs. "It may seem excessive," admits Michele.
"But I think Courtney will appreciate it all when she grows up." Unfortunately,
she might have nothing to look at. By the time Courtney turns 30, sunlight may have
faded most of her color childhood photos, and in the off chance that the tiny VHS‑C
videotapes featuring her many firsts survive decades of heart and humidity, there
probably won’t be a machine to play them back on.
Home videos and snapshots aren't all that are at risk. Librarians and archivists
warn we're losing vast amounts of important scientific and historical material
because of disintegration or obsolescence. Already gone is up to 20 percent of the
data collected on Jet Propulsion Laboratory computers during NASA's 1976 Viking
missions to Mars. Also at risk are 4,000 reels of census data stored in a format
so obscure that archivists doubt they'll be able to recover it. By next year,
75 percent of federal government records will be in electronic form, and no one
is sure how much of it will be readable in as little as 10 years. "The more
technologically advanced we get, the more fragile we become," says Abby Smith
of the Council on Library and Information Resources.
For years, computer scientists said the ones and zeros of digital data would stick
around forever. They were wrong. Tests by the National Media Lab, a Minnesota‑based
government and industry consortium, found that magnetic tapes might last only a
decade, depending on storage conditions. The fate of floppy disks, videotape and
hard drives is just as bleak. Even the CD‑ROM, once touted as indestructible,
is proving vulnerable to stray magnetic fields, oxidation, humidity and material
decay. The fragility of electronic media isn't the only problem. Much of the
hardware and software configurations needed to tease intelligible information from
preserved disks and tapes are disappearing in the name of progress. "Technology
is moving too quickly," says Charlie Mayn, who runs the Special Media Preservation
lab at the National Archives.
He speaks from experience. In the 1980s, the Archives transferred some 200,000 documents
and images onto optical disks, which are in danger of becoming indecipherable because
the system archivists used is no longer on the market. "Any technology can go
the way of eight‑tract and Betamax‑ says Smith, whose own dissertation
is trapped on an obsolete 5 1/4" floppy. "Information doesn't have much
of a chance, unless you keep a museum of tape players and PCs around." That
may not be such a farfetched idea. Mayn's temperature‑controlled lab in
the bowels of the National Archives houses many machines once used to record history.
In one room, archivists are resurrecting the 1948 whistle‑stop oratory of
President Harry Truman; the give 'em‑hell speeches were recorded on spools
of thin still wire, an ancestor of reel‑to‑reel tape recordings. Though
some of the wires have rusted and snap during playbacks, Mayn and his team are busy
"migrating", or transferring, what they're able to recover onto more
stable modern media.
Unfortunately, migration isn't a perfect solution. "Sometimes not all the
data makes the trip," says Smith. Recently the Food and Drug Administration
said that some pharmaceutical companies were finding errors as they transferred
drug‑testing data from Unix to Windows NT operating systems. In some instances,
the errors resulted in blood-pressure numbers that were randomly off by up to eight
digits.
So what's to be done? "That's a question no one really has an answer
for," says Smith. A good way to start is to separate the inconsequential from
the historic, and save on simple formats. Making those decisions won't be easy,
especially for families like the Brighams, who continue to roll video on their young
daughter. "We don’t want to miss anything," says Michele. Unfortunately,
they may have to.