Old Typesetting files

At 02:18 PM 11/12/2004, you wrote: Maybe I'm too close to the issue, but I continue to grow more and more overwhelmed by the daunting task of archiving and preserving old data. Certainly any one of us has faced these sorts of issues many times in the course of our collecting and preservation. A book publisher has little financial incentive to archive electronic versions of old books. Someone else, some other business with different motives, will need to do it. A good friend of mine, a C-64 era author, wrote his C-64 books on an old Atari system. He threw out the manuscript floppies a long time ago, thinking no one would want them. Collectors have re-scanned his works, I believe. I'm a big fan of my state's "open records" laws. Yet they mandate only preserving records for seven years. The law no doubt dates from the practicalities of preserving massive amounts of paper. It hasn't been updated for electronic records, which would be far easier to preserve indefinitely. But my state's laws say that every document (paper letter, email, etc.) created by an employee, elected or appointed official is presumed to be a public record (within the limits of a handful of allowed exceptions.) Yet in reality, local government agencies can't even retrieve email stored on previous versions of Windows Exchange servers, nor can they read backups from older versions of Windows without reviving old hardware and software. In my own explorations of putting local government records on my community web site, I discovered that the County had used a 8-inch-floppy-based word processing system to type the minutes of its Board of Supervisors meetings. Once the seven years had expired, and the bound book versions of the minutes had been produced, no one saved the floppies. Dang! It would have been intensely useful to have saved these minutes. I see an ever-growing window of lost experience as electronic records are not preserved and accessible. There's not much use in cursing the short-sighted who destroy the data. If you want to save it, Someone will need to step forward to do so. You know all about "The Little Red Hen", right? Enterprise-wide Google-like technology will be present and integral in many organizations in the years to come. We'll only be able to index what we've saved and kept in online storage. To me, the upside of electronic record preservation is the other side of the Orwellian sword. Just as Orwell never imagined that people would voluntarily put view-screens in every room, did he imagine that technology could be a way to keep an eye on government? - John