<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2668" name=GENERATOR></HEAD> <BODY> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3> </FONT> <P><FONT face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size=2><STRONG>Digital preservation</STRONG></FONT></P> <P><FONT face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size=2><BR>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.</FONT></P> <P><FONT face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size=2>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.</FONT></P> <P><FONT face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size=2>See "Eternal Bits," by MacKenzie Smith:<BR><A href="http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jul05/0705bit.html">http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jul05/0705bit.html</A></FONT></P></FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Best wishes, Henry</FONT></DIV> <DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV></BODY></HTML>