Today I used my Kindle Fire HD with the Overdrive app to borrow and download, for the very first time, a book from the Hennepin County Library (one of Lawhead’s, if you care). I’m a student of library and information science, you know, and this is how I stay on the cutting edge.
What have I learned in my class so far? The most disturbing thing is that all that stuff we’re digitalizing to “preserve it?” It’s all crumbling to dust. CDs, DVDs, floppies, tape, every single digital medium deteriorates over time. As I recall they give the average CD-ROM a little over 20 years.
The most stable media for preserving data remain, for the time being, archival quality paper and microform.
Just to give you something to worry about tonight.
I’d be interested to hear the professor’s opinion on data centers. Magnetic disc drives do deteriorate, but they do so in predictable ways as long as they are powered on. they can store the data duplicated, and are less likely to lose that data due to mechanical failure than by being struck by a meteor (assuming drives are replaced when suggested).
We can’t understand why archivists aren’t all using this? I know it’s more expensive than a climate controlled room with archival quality paper and microform, but the retrieval is a whole lot easier.
We’d also call it theoretically “more stable” since failure is detected and replaced whereas mildew, etc. can take a toll on paper which would not necessarily be checked as frequently as the computers can check their drives.
Of course, we computer people believe we can solve the rest of the world’s problems with a wave of our hand 🙂
Does the claim about CD-ROM longevity refer to one that is used often or one that is rarely used? It would seem that that would be pertinent.
Dale, what I understood was that even if the disk just sits on a shelf, it is deteriorating.
Eric, that’s a good question. I should ask about that.
The point of digital storage isn’t that it is passively long lasting. It is that it is easy to backup, so with a little bit of active maintenance it is long lasting.
I’m one up on you. I’ve used Overdrive to borrow audio books on my library card. They download to my android cell phone and I play them over my car speakers using a fake cassette tape that has a cable I plug into the headphone jack.
My only issue with the process was that there is only a two week loan period. The mp3 download has digital rights encoded into it, so when you renew it you have to download new files, which can be quite large and take a bit of time to download. At home it connects to my DSL wifi but if I’m in town using g3 it takes forever.
Yes. Only books last.