Researchers focus on forestalling 'Digital Dark Age'

Digitization was hailed as the savior of information, able to preserve and make accessible everything from the contents of the Library of Congress to old radio shows. But experts now say much of that information could be lost—or at least impossible to retrieve—due to changing technology and standards.

"Today, we can read and interpret the Dead Sea Scrolls written almost 2000 years ago, but we cannot do the same with information generated 20 years ago and stored on a 5.25 inch floppy disk," said Dalit Naor, manager of Storage Technologies at the IBM Haifa Research Lab. "Ironically, as the world becomes digital, we may be entering a 'Digital Dark Age'. We need to plan for and manage the obsolescence of software and formats, for example by transforming the data to a newer format or ensuring we have the ability to emulate the software."

Researchers at IBM's Haifa, Israel, lab say they've found a way to solve that problem. They're working on the Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval (CASPAR) project, launched as part of the European Union’s program to preserve cultural and scientific resources. The project covers cultural data, scientific data, and contemporary arts.

IBM Research's role in CASPAR will center on a new storage concept called Preservation Datastores. This technology uses open standards and the Open Archival Information System to provide a common storage interface. The IBM approach encapsulates not only the data being preserved, but also metadata with information on context and format, the type of software or operating system required to access the information and other details.

In short, it saves everything needed to interpret the data hundreds of years after it is stored.