Archivists are racing to digitise 300 years of newspapers before they crumble

If i understand the physics right, any kind of order/information will eventually decay into chaos. With the ultimate of that being the heat (gradient) death of the universe.

For that advantage to be worth anything, the material has to actually be...copied.

Central repositories for this stuff are fine, maybe even essential. But they need to also be spreading around full copies quite liberally.

It takes time for paper and ink to decay. It takes time for charges to leak. It takes time for PGA packages to deteriorate. Call this t_decay.

In general, t_make << t_decay even for paper, and with electronic information, it's more profound. A really good number is this ratio, which in this case, t_make/t_decay is roughly 1/300 (assumes this project will take a year, which is probably high). For electronic backup, I'd imagine it's more like 1/10^6 or so.

That said, some human effort is needed to keep information alive over long period of time. But it's only t_make effort every t_decay period, which actually isn't a lot, on it's face. It's an interesting question though what the maximum amount of data humanity can keep alive given a certain level of economic output. E.g. if you make 10^7 hard drives a year that store 10^12 bits and they each last 10 years, then you can store 10^20 bits indefinitely. (10^7 hard drives x 10 years x 10^12 bits).

At some point around 5000 years ago writing emerged. People wrote down things like “such and such is the king of all the world. He is the son of such and such.” If these things survived and we have them today, we call that history. There’s a convention of dating the beginning of history to the first writing and calling everything before that prehistory. The specifics are cloudy and debatable. Does it count if we can’t read it? Does it count if it’s not classifiable as “writing.” If people paint a cave and we understand they were talking about hunting aurochses with spears, then we know there were some people here that hunted aurochses with spear. Does that count as writing?

Vague semantic lines aside, there’s an idea here that’s interesting. When people can write about something as it happens and put that information down, that’s history. The historical age. There’s something to that, an important difference between information communicated to us by people of that time rather than us knowing by studying less direct artefacts.

All this writing, all this history, has been accelerating like most technology. Every century (except for a few bumpy patches) we’ve been mooing more of it, making more history. More places, people perspectives, details. We’ve added pictures (if cave painting don’t count, are paparazzi snaps of Kardashian’s arse out too?) and video, 3d images, seismographic data and a whole lot of other stuff to that pile. History is exploding. Terry’s History Monks must be having fits.

Anyway, say we move forward a bit and say the current trends keep going for that bit. CCTVs are now omnidirectional. The cops finally agreed to wear body cams, but insist that the crooks wear them too and the politicians while we’re at it. Computers can rewind every bit that ever flipped. Since everyone has an ear-chip and a groin-chip installed (google glass was the last attempt at okular recording devices, too invasive), our lives are recorded fully. Psychology finally works because instead of asking about your mother, a guy with a 19th century bohemian accent just becomes you as a suckling babe for a bit and figures out what went wrong. Maybe he reads her old tweets.

I think that’s a new age. I know this gets us into naming convention problems when the next age comes, but I’d like to call it posthistory. The period before people recorded their commentary on events, the period when they did and the period when everything was recorded in full.

I actually do think that’s coming and I do think it will be a profound change. I think we’re in a sort of grey transitional period where not everything is recorded, but sufficiently more than in previous times that we’re back to troubling questions “do symbolic representation systems that only have symbols for tax related concepts like cheese, beer and god-kings count as real writing and therefore history,” but with a more posthistoric flavour and copyright issues. If Maldu of unya

Oh, and I think bit rot will get solved, unless zombies or meteors or something. Shuruppak sent a note to Labek telling him not to screw around with married women 5000 years ago and we can still read it. I think we can preserve “LOL UR mom is crazy!!!!!”

While it's "easier" to lose digital, it's a possibility as opposed to the inevitability of losing physical forms like paper, LPs, or wire spool recordings. Physical degrades, there's no (economically feasible) way around it.

In the case of digital forms of the same media, they're stored in high resolution, lossless formats for archival purposes and then down sampled for day to day use. For example, our image scans were 300dpi tifs while the day to day versions were simple pngs. Audio files had equivalent things.

The vision is that the lossless versions can be updated to the latest and greatest formats over time and the smaller versions can be recreated as needed.

It's sort of a mix between archive.org and google news. It aggregates and archives articles on the web for current events each day. I've been archiving the top stories each day since December 2014.

Part of my interest in this is to preserve human history in the digital age. We already have the means of storing articles, photos, videos and more of current events as they happen. It's a work in progress, but it's something I spend a couple hours each week hoping to improve it over time.

Edit: Take a look at the top stories in January 2015 at http://tracket.com/2015/01

2) the loss of print media is happening right now, today, while the loss of digital media is not quite as pressing. "Kicking the can" in a sense.

Considering that paper composes the majority of the mass in that installation, a sustained hypoxic environment at 14% or below is exactly how this system should be designed.

If the papers were separated into separate warehouses, they would still all have the same environmental requirements. Additionally, you require N times more budget, where N is the number of warehouses you've constructed (not to mention the difficulty in querying physically distributed warehouses for information).

> I don't understand why this is a problem. Scan them to pdf files, and put them on web pages. Let google index them.

Before making such broad, sweeping statements, perhaps read up a bit on the principles of information science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_science

Edit: You are editing your comment every few minutes, so I don't know what to reply to anymore.