Storage and archival concerns

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"Good ol' rock. Nothing beats rock."

- Bart Simpson

Despite all our vaunted technological developments and modern media, we still haven't found a more reliable way to keep records than carving stone tablets.

Tourists of Italy can attest to the existence of the civilation of Rome because they can see their remains. Their bodies have long since turned to dust, but their words and ideas are preserved for history in the stone they chiseled, carved and crafted. We can see them with our eyes and feel them with our fingers (as long as officials are looking). The rock lasts - through earthquakes and fires, through medieval feuds and the wars between freedom and fascists. Stone can be shattered and the words remain in the rubble. The same can't be said of a DVD or hard drive. Paper loses to scissor and is annihilated by fire.

The period after the fall of Rome, commonly referred to as the "Dark Ages" bring to mind images of medieval torture and general ingorance of the populace. This is an incorrect understanding of the time. The Dark Ages weren't "dark" for the difficulty of life, but are called dark because we have so little information about the time. The habit of storing records and creating stone monuments had fallen away as the populace faced survival challenges. Aqueducts deteriorated and roads remained unguarded, exposing former Roman citizens to increased banditry and the difficulty of aquiring water and food on a daily basis. Some historians are concerned we are living in a modern dark age - not because life is terrible, but because knowledge of our time will be lost to future historians as we forget how to boot Windows.

Modern filmmakers face difficult archival problems as well. Various film formats have had varied longevity. Nitrate based films are prone to intense combustion - leading to the loss of many early films to fire (and deliberate destruction by short-sighted studios), but modern, cellulose-triacetate and polyester-based film stocks have a relatively impressive shelf-life. A three-color separation print thrown in a salt mine and forgotten for a hundred years will be viewable by any human with decent vision and a light source, even if 35mmm projectors are forgotten. The pictures exist on a human scale and are directly observable. Framerate and sound pose their own problems, but the visual record remains.

Today's filmmakers, however, increasinlgy eschew film for digital image aquisition - and the sheer enormity of the data involved presents its own storage challenges. The increased complexity implied by so many 1's and 0's are a surpassable, if annoying, addition to the more difficult challenge of maintenance tasks required by electronic storage. Regular data migration and error checking offer increased opportunity for the data loss and increased cost to those responsible for the preservation of the medium.

There are no easy answers here. Preservation is possible, but must be compromised with respect to practical and financial concerns. The value of the work, and its preservation, increases over time - but the temporal, cognitive and economic costs can be difficult hurdles to clear. We've definitely made improvements as our cultural awareness and committment to preservation increases - but the difficulty also grows with the complexity and amount of media. We will always have a finite preservational capacity - wherease the quantity of preservable materials grows over time. Who decides which pieces are lost and how are these decisions made? Hopefully we've at least reached a point where these decisions are being made, rather than falling to happenstance.

This debate is nothing new, a scant 100 years ago there was concern that history would be lost with the degredation of newspaper. As we move forward we must keep an eye on the longevity and survivability of our work, for the sake of our children's children and the sanity of future historians. After all, our bodies WILL turn to dust, but we can show our lives to future generations if we choose.