As ever more information (text, sound and image) is shifted from the printed page and onto hard drives and servers, its long-term survival becomes uncertain and problematic. 

Where information exists only in digital form many questions of originality, intent, context, and veracity, must go unanswered. For example, after a digital photograph is downloaded from the camera (digital storage cards) to the computer there is no way to know how many times the original file may have been duplicated or altered. In effect there is no original—nothing comparable to a film negative.

Moreover, as our scientific, cultural, literary, artistic, political, spiritual and historical records are increasingly saved only in digital form they are subject to unprecedented levels of risk—from incompetent archiving practices and the failure to migrate them to new media as digital storage formats and software become obsolete and are replaced. And where those files exist on the web they are subject to cyber attack, the failure of the servers hosting the files and breakdowns of the web infrastructure.

Historians and scholars lament the destruction of the library in ancient Alexandria. Yet in our zeal to embrace digital technology we may be creating the conditions for a modern version of what happened there. To the extent we entrust our collective world library to digital media and the web, and fail to back it up with non-digital, durable and archival forms, we are positioning ourselves for what could be the greatest single loss of knowledge and information in history. 

Simplicity is a virtue. Books have survived for centuries—as unchanged physical records they have literally been handed down from generation to generation. A person can read a book by the light of the sun, a candle, or kerosene lamp but to access digital information he or she must have the necessary hardware, software and electricity and live within an economic, social and political sphere that makes it possible.

Imagine if the Constitution of the United States existed only as a Microsoft Word document and no hard copy with the actual signatures of the signers existed. Could the nation rely upon something so insubstantial and unverifiable—something that could be changed without a tell tale trace or deleted with a keystroke? And even if there were multiple copies of the file who could tell which was really the original? After all, you can’t carbon date a digital file.

Clearly it is counterproductive  not to use digital technology to record and archive the important texts, sounds and images of our civilization. However, to put all our informational eggs in the digital basket is foolish. If we want to preserve and pass on a meaningful record of our own times and the past we cannot treat that record as digital ephemera. We must preserve it in both digital and non-digital forms. The printed book remains one of the best ways  to do this—to preserve and pass information from person to person, generation to generation and from century to century. So lets not rush to empty our bookshelves.

© Michael Maurer Smith 2009