Your Data At Risk report from UK National Council on Archives, September 02005
The United Kingdom’s National Council on Archives advocacy report (15 pages) Your Data At Risk: Why you should be worried about preserving electronic records (download link; Adobe Acrobat PDF, 390KB)), though its audience is UK policy makers and practitioners, is well worth reviewing.
Coincidentally, I’m reading Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines, set in a distant future in which gigantic cities roam the world in search of other smaller cities and towns that they ingest. Among the guilds that keep the cities functioning is the Guild of Historians. Their task is to seek out pieces of the past such as old technology that might be useful. The most useless pieces of old technology, however, are computer parts, including data stored on CD-ROMs, which are called “seedys”. These bits of plastic can’t be read because all knowledge of how to reconstruct a computer and CD-ROM drive has been lost, so the seedys end up being recycled into trinkets. The book was written for young adults.
