New universes or black holes? Does digital change anything?
2012
In 1995, Jeff Rothenberg of the Rand Corporation published an article describing how, in 2045, his grandchildren will find a letter and a CD-ROM in the attic of his house. The letter explains that the CD-ROM contains a document which provides the key to Rothenberg’s fortune. But the children have never seen a CD-ROM before and there is doubt as to whether they can find the right hardware or software to read it. Rothenberg’s view of the fragility of digital documents, best expressed in his mantra that ‘digital information lasts forever – or five years, whichever comes first’, motivated a generation of digital preservation experts and is the current orthodoxy.1 The Rothenberg view of the world is neatly summarized on the website of the British Library:Without the right computer, disk drive, operating system and software, the information on a computer disk cannot be seen or understood. The storage media for digital materials can also be short-lived. Magneticmaterials such as floppy disks and magnetic tape deteriorate in a very short time compared to paper. The greatest challenge, however, is the speed at which the technology isdeveloping and changing and the rate at which hardware and software become obsolete, with little or no backward compatibility. Even if a CD-ROM were to last for 100 years, there may no longer be a computer or software to read it.2