[ih] archival quality, was Internet-history Digest

[John Day]

Of course it is survival bias, that is the point.

A lot of was destroyed, burned, left to rot, throw away, etc. Some old texts that were to be suppressed (or just considered old) were turned into bookbindings of other books. (Yes, old texts have been recovered this way.)

The whole point is that even with all our efforts, some of it will be lost. HP thought they had a very nice safe archive facility for their corporate papers . . . until it was burned to the ground. We have to go to great lengths to ensure that that probability is low.

So far, none of the digital media has been shown to last long enough to be called archival. It isn’t that we haven’t waited 100 years to see if we can read it. It is that we already know what it’s lifetime is as media. If we know that then it is too short. As Brian indicated, a media that requires human intervention on a regular basis is a non starter. We need something that if left alone for a very long time will still be decipherable.

> On May 8, 2021, at 22:12, John Levine via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> It appears that Marc Weber via Internet-history <marc at webhistory.org> said:
>> As to which media outlast others, it’s interesting that most new media are more ephemeral than the ones that came before.... Clay
>> tablets were so durable they baked hard in fires. Paper is more fragile but can still last millennia. ...
> 
> I think we have survivor bias here -- the only records we have from a
> thousand years ago are the ones that happened to be on media that last
> a thousand years. I expect there were plenty of things written on
> badly tanned vellum which rotted away, using organic inks that flaked
> and faded to illegibility.
> 
> I do agree that we have a profusion of the high tech equvalent of badly 
> tanned vellum these days.
> 
> R's,
> John
> -- 
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history