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Interview
Preserving History in Multimedia: An Interview with Stanford's Michael Keller
7/9/2008
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Keller is also involved in another venture: a worldwide effort to digitally preserve vast amounts of material from history, both aging paper documents and very recent digital content. We talked with Keller about the effort, which is being spearheaded by both Stanford and Sun Microsystems through a group called the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG).
Campus Technology: Why is it so critical to get this preservation effort going now?
Michael Keller: The truth is that we've already lost a whole bunch of stuff. The loss started as technologies began to evolve....
The rate of change has increased, and therefore we have material around today that's really, really hard to read. If you try today to read a WordPerfect document you created 15 years ago, you'd have a very hard time doing it. That's just an illustration of the problem. We have a whole bunch of material that's no longer readable [or] that's becoming unreadable, and, if we don't take care of that, we're going to be missing documentation of our world--not a good thing.
CT: So part of it is a format problem. Is part of the problem that any media simply fades over time?
Keller: There's a bit of that, but mostly it's formatting. It is true that certain carriers especially tend to dissolve or change their characteristics [over time].... For instance, magnetic tape has a physical carrier which is plastic and a magnetic carrier which is some kind of metallic oxide. Those two expand and contract at different rates. If you leave them alone and you don't rewind the tapes once a year or so, eventually, the magnetic carrier and the physical carrier separate. When that happens, you may not be able to play [the tape] at all, or, if you do run it through the readers, you may discover that it's the last time you can read them.
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