Old Typesetting files

[Tom Jennings]

I concede to most of your points. It's a big job, and
the proliferation of incompatible media isn't always just
consumerism, though it often is. It's certainly all a big mess.



On Fri, 12 Nov 2004, John Foust wrote:

> Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 14:42:35 -0600
> From: John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com>
> Reply-To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
>     <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re: Old Typesetting files
> 
> At 02:18 PM 11/12/2004, you wrote:
> >I can't think of a better example of the stupidness of consumer
> >capitalism. Consumption and obsolescence should be undesirable side-effects
> >of human living, not the core reason for existence.
> 
> Maybe I'm too close to the issue, but I continue to grow more and
> more overwhelmed by the daunting task of archiving and preserving
> old data.  Certainly any one of us has faced these sorts of issues 
> many times in the course of our collecting and preservation.  A book 
> publisher has little financial incentive to archive electronic versions 
> of old books.  Someone else, some other business with different motives, 
> will need to do it.
> 
> A good friend of mine, a C-64 era author, wrote his C-64 books on an old
> Atari system.  He threw out the manuscript floppies a long time ago,
> thinking no one would want them.  Collectors have re-scanned his 
> works, I believe.
> 
> I'm a big fan of my state's "open records" laws.  Yet they mandate
> only preserving records for seven years.  The law no doubt dates from
> the practicalities of preserving massive amounts of paper.  It hasn't
> been updated for electronic records, which would be far easier to
> preserve indefinitely.  But my state's laws say that every document
> (paper letter, email, etc.) created by an employee, elected or
> appointed official is presumed to be a public record (within
> the limits of a handful of allowed exceptions.)
> 
> Yet in reality, local government agencies can't even retrieve email 
> stored on previous versions of Windows Exchange servers, nor can they 
> read backups from older versions of Windows without reviving old 
> hardware and software.
> 
> In my own explorations of putting local government records on 
> my community web site, I discovered that the County had used a
> 8-inch-floppy-based word processing system to type the minutes
> of its Board of Supervisors meetings.  Once the seven years had
> expired, and the bound book versions of the minutes had been
> produced, no one saved the floppies.  Dang!  It would have been
> intensely useful to have saved these minutes.  I see an ever-growing
> window of lost experience as electronic records are not preserved
> and accessible.
> 
> There's not much use in cursing the short-sighted who destroy
> the data.  If you want to save it, Someone will need to step forward
> to do so.  You know all about "The Little Red Hen", right?
> 
> Enterprise-wide Google-like technology will be present and integral
> in many organizations in the years to come.  We'll only be able to 
> index what we've saved and kept in online storage.
> 
> To me, the upside of electronic record preservation is the
> other side of the Orwellian sword.  Just as Orwell never imagined
> that people would voluntarily put view-screens in every room,
> did he imagine that technology could be a way to keep an eye
> on government?
> 
> - John
>