[SPG_Active_Members] Swiss format archive

[Larry Masinter]

What did it for me was the guy in a jacket with a label "Swiss Fort
Knox" and the  quote "Accompanied by burly security guards in black
uniforms, scientists carried a time capsule through a labyrinth of
tunnels and five security zones to a vault near the slopes of chic ski
resort Gstaad."

 

 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64H4GE20100519

 

Sounds like a setup for a bad movie about digital preservation. 

 

Burly? Black? Labyrinth? Security zones? Ski resort?

 

 

Are there guards? Who pays them? Who makes sure the guards don't
destroy the data?

 

How is the data to be accessed? Updated? 

 

Larry

 

 

From: scc_active-bounces at computerhistory.org
[mailto:scc_active-bounces at computerhistory.org] On Behalf Of Olin
Sibert
Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2010 5:19 AM
To: CHM SCC
Subject: Re: [SPG_Active_Members] Swiss format archive

 

I think calling this a "publicity stunt" is being too kind.

They seem to be claiming that they have created some unique physical
artifact, which must be kept secret and stored safely away untouched
by human hands, as if it's some kind of digital Rosetta Stone awaiting
a future Champollion to discover it and magically bring enlightenment.

What bosh. If they really wanted to help "future generations to read
data stored using defunct technology", they'd collect the information
publicly, and store replicas of it all over the world (e.g., the
Internet). I mean, even granting that they might be smart people, what
if they forgot something? Surely would be better to find that out
sooner, rather than when the "time capsule" gets opened decades hence.


One of the great things about digital data, and about paper, too, is
the ease with which it can be replicated. We've learned a bit in the
last few thousand years, and one of those things is that carving marks
in stone tablets--while certainly durable--had some disadvantages.
Another is that open, collective models tend to preserve and maintain
information better than secret ones.

I'd be sore disappointed if it had been my 15 million Euros spent on
this.

And does anyone really believe that formats like the CD won't be
readily readable 25 years hence? The Yellow Book CD-ROM standard is
already 25 years old, and billions of data CDs are sold every year,
all of which are instantly readable by billions of devices across the
globe. It may lose popularity, but it's not going away. The media may
deteriorate, sure, and that's a serious issue, but if the media is
gone, some magic box of instructions for reading the format won't
help.

Furthermore, is the guy who's complaining about not being able to read
his thesis actually serious? He seems to have received his Ph.D. in
1993, so it's not likely his data is stored on 7-track magtape or
something actually difficult like that. If he used a PC (or a Mac),
I'll bet that if he could FIND the diskettes or CDs on which he stored
it, he wouldn't have much trouble reading them with any modern version
of Word or WordPerfect, because they have converters for old formats
built in. And if he used LaTeX on some Unix system, well, that hasn't
exactly disappeared, either. His case might be bad luck--perhaps all
his backups are on some wacky QIC tape cartridge format--but even
there, it's not hard to find specialists to read that media today. And
if there aren't any backups? Well, that's always a sad story, but
knowing how to interpret the format the backups should have been in is
cold comfort indeed.

Stunts like this distract from the very real problems of organizing
and cataloging valuable information, of devising tools for maintaining
format compatibility, of developing truly durable and inexpensive
storage media, and of ensuring reliable, survivable, accessible
storage.

 -- Olin Sibert



At 03:08 AM 5/20/2010, Peter Capek wrote:



There seems not to be anything very serious or very detailed.  There
is a web site which took some effort to find with a bit more
information:  http://www.planets-project.eu/

The effort seems to be a part of the PLANETS project, a cooperative
effort among 16 organizations, of which 2 got the credit for putting
the box in the mountain.

It seems to me as much as anything to have been a publicity stunt.

Peter Capek

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