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Re: long-term archiving

2016-01-28 13:45:00
In short, just work out ways to preserve the bits. If you keep the
bits you can be reasonably confident that the technology will be there
to read them.

This probably seems pretty retro, but a good way to do that is to
print them out.  We know how to make quality paper that is stable for
centuries, and since the pigment in black laser toner is usually
carbon black, it's unlikely to fade.  You could print some sort of bar
code for binary stuff but for text, printing the text should be fine
since OCR is unlikely to disappear, and that makes it a lot easier for
future librarians to tell what it is they're looking at.

If we're archiving audio or video recordings, I concede that bar code
on paper would be bulky.  At this point the state of the art seems to
be to record it several times on whatever media seem like a good idea
today, and recopy them every decade.

R's,
John