[SCC_Active_Members] Perhaps of interest (from http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/techalert/jul05/ta071305.html)

[H.M. Gladney]

Digital preservation


It took two centuries to fill the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington,
D.C., with more than 29 million books and periodicals, 2.7 million
recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 57 million
manuscripts. Today it takes about 15 minutes for the world to churn out an
equivalent amount of new digital information. It does so about 100 times
every day, for a grand total of five exabytes annually. That's an amount
equal to all the words ever spoken by humans.

Regrettably, our capacity to make all these bits accessible in 200 or even
20 years remains a work in progress, and the problem may start right at
home: for example, people who wrote their Ph.D. dissertations in WordStar in
the mid-1980s can no longer read them.

See "Eternal Bits," by MacKenzie Smith:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jul05/0705bit.html

 
Best wishes, Henry
 
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