Wednesday, March 25, 2009
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Are We Losing Our Memory? or The Museum of Obsolete Technology
Are We Losing Our Memory? or The Museum of Obsolete Technology

by Alexander Stille

Running out of time at the National Archives.

In a temperature-controlled laboratory in the bowels of the vast new 
National Archives building outside Washington - nearly two million 
square feet of futuristic steel and glass construction - an engineer 
cranks up an old Thomas A. Edison phonograph. A cylindrical disc 
begins to turn and from its large wooden horn we suddenly hear the 
scratchy oompah-pah of a marching band striking up a tune at a Knights 
of Columbus parade in July of 1902.

Nearby sits an ancestor of the modern reel-to-reel tape recorder; it's 
the very machine that recorded President Harry Truman's famous whistle- stop speeches as he traveled the country by train during his legendary 
come-from-behind victory in the election of 1948. Instead of capturing 
sound on magnetic tape, the device stored its data on coils of thin 
steel wire as fine as fishline. Now some of the wire has rusted, and 
it occasionally snaps when it is played back through the machine.

This laboratory, in the Department of Special Media Preservation, is a 
kind of museum of obsolete technology where Archives technicians try 
to tease information out of modern media that have long vanished from 
circulation. But the laboratory is more than a curious rag-and-bone 
shop of technologies past; in many ways, it offers a cautionary vision 
of the future. The problem of technological obsolescence - of fading 
words and images locked in odd-looking, out-of-date gizmos - is an 
even bigger problem for the computer age than for the new media 
produced in the first half of the 20th century.

One of the great ironies of the information age is that, while the 
late twentieth century will undoubtedly have recorded more data than 
any other period in history, it will also almost certainly have lost 
more information than any previous era. A study done in 1996 by the 
Archives concluded that, at current levels, it would take 
approximately 120 years to transfer the backlog of nontextual material 
(photographs, videos, film, audiotapes, and microfilm) to a more 
stable format. "And in quite a few cases, we're talking about media 
that are expected to last about 20 years," said Charles Mayn, the head 
of the laboratory. Decisions about what to keep and what to discard 
will be made by default, as large portions will simply deteriorate 
beyond the point of viability.

. . .

Potentially, the computer age appears to offer the historian's Holy 
Grail of infinite memory and of instant, permanent access to virtually 
limitless amounts of information. But as the pace of technological 
change increases, so does the speed at which each new generation of 
equipment supplants the last. "Right now, the half-life of most 
computer technology is between three and five years," said Steve 
Puglia, a preservation and imaging specialist whose laboratory is just 
down the hall from Mayn's. In the 1980s, the Archives stored 250,000 
documents and images on optical disks - the cutting edge of new 
technology at the time. "I'm not sure we can play them," said Puglia, 
explaining that they depend on computer software and hardware that is 
no longer on the market.

In fact, there appears to be a direct relationship between the newness 
of technology and its fragility. A librarian at Yale University, Paul 
Conway, has created a graph going back to ancient Mesopotamia that 
shows that while the quantity of information being saved has increased 
exponentially, the durability of media has decreased almost as 
dramatically. The clay tablets that record the laws of ancient Sumer 
are still on display in museums around the world. Many medieval 
illuminated manuscripts written on animal parchment still look as if 
they were painted and copied yesterday. Paper correspondence from the 
Renaissance is faded by still in good condition while books printed on 
modern acidic paper are already turning to dust. Black-and-white 
photographs may last a couple of centuries, while most color 
photographs become unstable within 30 or 40 years. Videotapes 
deteriorate much more quickly than does traditional movie film - 
generally lasting about 20 years. And the latest generation of digital 
storage tape is considered safe for about ten years, after which it 
should be copied to avoid loss of data.

. . .

In theory, computer technology should be more helpful with the storage 
of textual documents than with the audio and video records of Mayn's 
dynamic media lab. But so far, it has only compounded the problem. In 
1989, a public interest group trying to get information about the Iran- contra scandal successfully sued the White House to prevent it from 
destroying any electronic records. The result is that all federal 
agencies must now preserve all their computer files and electronic 
mail. Because government offices use different kinds of computers, 
software programs, and formats, just recovering this material has 
proved to be a logistical nightmare. It took the National Archives two 
and a half years (and its entire electronic records staff) just to 
make a secure copy of all the electronic records of the Reagan White 
House. And it may take years more to make most of them intelligible. 
"They are gibberish as they currently stand," said Fynette Eaton, who 
worked at the Archives' Center of Electronic Records before moving 
over to the Smithsonian Institution.

The beauty of digital technology is that it reduces everything to a 
series of zeroes and ones - a simple, seemingly universal mathematical 
language - but unless one has the software that gives meaning to those 
zeroes and ones, the data is meaningless. The problem of deciphering 
Egyptian hieroglyphs may look like child's play compared with 
recovering all the information on the hundreds of major software 
programs that have been discarded during the astonishing 
transformations of the computer revolution.

The losses from the first decades of the digital age are likely to be 
considerable. The federal government, with its multitude of 
departments, agencies, and offices, is a dense thicket of incompatible 
computer languages and formats - many of them old and obsolete. Many 
of the records of the National Military Command Center are stored in a 
database management system (known as NIPS) that IBM no longer supports 
and that the National Archives has difficulty translating into 
readable form. The Agent Orange Task Force has been unable to use 
herbicide records written in NIPS format.

. . .

Full story at:
http://www.lostmag.com/issue3/memory.php

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