Electronic media is ephemeral in nature. Thousands of years ago, information was carved into rock, and we still have many of the originals. Then it was written onto scrolls, some of which survive today. Now it's on a disk, with a lifetime of a few years. If not for archive.org many of the early Internet material would be forever lost (cf. the case of GeoCities). "What if Google goes bankrupt?" would be a wrong way to phrase the question because of its predicative inevitability. Indeed, companies have been known to outlive their founders, whole generations of people and even their countries of origin but they will, given enough time, cease to exist. "In the long run, we're all dead", as it was brilliantly put by Keynes. In 500 years how much of what people create today will still exist? If we preserve data with the sole consideration of its commercial viability, much of our intellectual production will be lost. The problem of long-term data preservation is not merely technical per se.
| ← Previous day | (Calendar) | Next day → |