The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Much has been written about the information glut we are creating and contributing to each day in our society. Over the last twelve months alone, we have created enough information to fill 500,000 Congressional Libraries, but I'm starting to wonder how people in the future will access the information we are creating. We can still read the original notes written by Newton and Michelangelo hundreds of years ago, but scientists last year discovered they couldn't read much of the research written by Nobel prize winning physicists from the 1950s and 60s because they couldn't find (or even reconstruct) one of the early computers these reports were written on. How we are storing the information we are creating is quickly becoming of vital importance. The British Broadcasting Service (BBC) recently announced that they would be working over the next several years to digitize, and place online, their entire archives. This will include all still photographs, video documentaries and television shows, radio broadcasts in multiple languages, and news reports. This is a massive undertaking and will employ several hundred people for up to five years. Banking on the continued expansion of broadband Internet service worldwide, and working against the archival policies of other news organizations such as the New York Times, and CNN, the BBC has decided that all of this content will be completely free to access. While a researcher's treasure trove is sure to be created from this effort, the wisdom of it is questionable. For the next 50 years this content will prove to be invaluable, but what then? Will they be willing to "re-digitize" everything again when the standards change, or when the format everything is saved in becomes obsolete? Now that the BBC has made this announcement, the pressure will grow for national broadcasters worldwide to follow their lead. Each nation will want their history, stories, and heroes to be front and centre on the Internet. Our generation, and our children's generation will surely benefit from the rush to digitize high-quality content, but what happens after that? Instant access to information must be balanced against access for generations to come. The same is true for home users. Many of my family photos are now only taken digitally. I've made videos of my kids, and recorded them singing songs they learned in school so they could be emailed to aunts and uncles. But panic reigned in my house several weeks ago when the motherboard on my laptop needed to be replaced. At first I thought the hard drive was corrupted and everything on it was going to be lost. The importance of backing up files hit home. But even as I was burning CDs filled with pictures and videos after my laptop came back, I began to wonder how I was going to be able to look, or listen to these files I'd created of my kids 10 or 20 years from now. I guess the space I'm saving by storing my photos on CDs won't come to much by the time I make sure I keep a computer around to view them on. (cfisher@mts.net)
