The digital dark age is the perception of a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical electronic documents and multimedia, because they have been recorded in an obsolete and obscure file format. The name derives from the term Dark Ages in the sense that there would be a relative lack of written record, as documents are transferred to digital formats and original copies lost.
Video Digital dark age
About
An early mention of the term was at a conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) in 1997. The term was also mentioned in 1998 at the Time and Bits conference, which was co-sponsored by the Long Now Foundation and the Getty Conservation Institute.
The problem is not limited to text documents, but applies equally to photos, video, audio and other kinds of electronic documents. One concern leading to the use of the term is that documents are stored on physical media which require special hardware in order to be read and that this hardware will not be available in a few decades from the time the document was created. For example, it is already the case that disk drives capable of reading 5 1/4 inch floppy disks are not readily available.
The Digital Dark Age also applies to the problems which arise due to obsolete file formats. In such a case, it is the lack of the necessary software which causes problems when retrieving stored documents. This is especially problematic when proprietary formats are used, in which case it might be impossible to write appropriate software to read the file.
Maps Digital dark age
Examples
A famous real example is with NASA, whose early space records have suffered from a Dark Age issue more than once. For over a decade, magnetic tapes from the 1976 Viking Mars landing were unprocessed. When later analyzed, the data was unreadable as it was in an unknown format and the original programmers had either died or left NASA. The images were eventually extracted following many months of puzzling through the data and examining how the recording machines functioned.
Another example is the BBC Domesday Project in which a survey of the nation was compiled 900 years after the Domesday Book was published. While the information in the Domesday Book is still accessible today, there were great fears that the discs of the Domesday Project would become unreadable as computers capable of reading the format had become rare and drives capable of accessing the discs even rarer. However, the system was emulated in 2002 using a system called DomesEm by the CAMiLEON project. This allows the information on the discs to be accessed on modern computers.
Encrypted data may also prove to be an issue, as the process needed to decode the data can increase complexity. Historically, encrypted data is quite rare, but even the very simple means available throughout history have provided many examples of documents that can only be read with great effort. For example, it took the capacity of a distributed computing project to break the mechanically generated code of a single brief World War II submarine tactical message. Modern encryption is being used in many more documents and media due to publishers wanting the promised protections of DRM.
Prevention
As more records have become stored in digital form, there have been several measures to standardize electronic file formats so software to read them is widely available and can be re-implemented on new platforms if necessary.
PDF/A is an open standard based on Adobe Systems PDF format. It has been widely adopted by governments and archives around the world, such as the United Kingdom.
The Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) has been standardized by OASIS in 2005, and by ISO in 2006. Since then, support for OpenDocument has been implemented in a large number of open source and proprietary software. Therefore, using OpenDocument is one option for archiving editable document from office applications. More broadly, using open source software for working with digital content can be used as a prevention measure. Since the software source code for reading and writing a file format is open, the code can be used as a base for future implementations. In 2007, the chief information officer of the UK's National Archives stated "We welcome open-source software because it makes our lives easier".
In 2007 Microsoft created a partnership with the UK's National Archives to prevent the digital dark age and "unlock millions of unreadable stored computer files". UK's National Archives now accepts various file formats for long term sustenance, including Office Open XML, PDF and OpenDocument.
The Internet Archive has stated that one of their goals is to prevent the digital dark age.
Even Vinton Cerf, Vice President of Google, showed his concerns about digital dark age and history preservation in the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: "As the way that we store information about ourselves develops, memories stored in files that use older technology are becoming harder to access. That could mean that historians of the future are unable to learn about our lives". His suggested solution consists of preserving a sample of every piece of software and hardware ever existed so that it never becomes obsolete. He proposed taking an X-ray snapshot of the content, the application and the operating system along with a description of the machine. This information should be then stored, instead of in a museum, in servers in the cloud.
See also
- Apollo 11 missing tapes
- Dark data
- Data archaeology
- Data corruption
- Digital continuity
- Digital obsolescence
- Digital preservation
- Orphaned Works
- Abandonware
- M-DISC
- Document Freedom Day
References
Further reading
- A Digital Dark Ages? Challenges in the Preservation of Electronic Information (PDF), 1997
- Coming Soon A Digital Dark Age - CBS News, 2003
- How huge quantities of data are rapidly falling into a black hole - Guardian Unlimited, 2003
- The digital Dark Age - The Sydney Morning Herald, 2005
- Why the Demise of Print Media May Be Bad for Humanity, Tony Bradley, PCWorld, 19 March 2012
- Bit Rot - The Economist, 28 April 2012
- "Raiders of the Lost Web", The Atlantic, USA, October 2015
External links
- Digital Dark Ages article at LISWiki, a Library science wiki
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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