Blackhole picture memory storage8/9/2023 ![]() Plenty of once-great civilisations have collapsed, and our current industrialised society is by no means invulnerable – in fact, due to the intricate interconnectedness of production and economies around the world today, our technological civilisation is perhaps more prone to a sudden collapse than other societies through history. Perhaps we should be thinking not just about our personal or cultural ephemera, but attempting to preserve a core kernel of human knowledge in case the worst were to happen. But how far should this information conservation extend? How do you decide what cultural output is worthy of being preserved? Are YouTube vloggers such as Zoella or LOLcats-style internet memes worthy?ĭoes a picture of a cat in a sink have any cultural worth? Photograph: Florchina/Getty Images/RooM RF The sound archives don’t save just music, but recordings of pivotal speeches, oral histories, dying languages and sounds of rare or extinct wildlife. Nasa has had great problems trying to recover and archive old information gathered by its space probes, simply because the knowledge had been lost on what archaic format the images and data had been saved in. Computer hard disks can hold vast amounts of digitised information, but everything is lost if it fails or is wiped. Similarily, deciding on the best format to preserve them for the next hundred years relies on anticipating what technology is likely to still be available in the future. If archivists don’t get to the deteriorating media soon, the very act of trying to copy a recording could destroy it in the process. These historical recordings exist on large reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes, lacquer discs and even wax cylinders, and are vulnerable not just to physical degradation, but obsolescence and the disappearance of the technology needed to play them. The sound archive at the British Library is one of the largest such repositories in the world, and the archivists here estimate that around two million of their recordings are fragile and at risk of being lost for ever. Tapes of his sessions have degraded beyond salvaging – the recording on a tape is stored as a magnetic imprint in a thin film of metal oxide, and if this delicate coating flakes off, the music is irretrievably lost. Yet, sadly, many of his original recordings have already been lost to time. As Lead Belly he is included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and is considered the godfather of modern music Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Led Zeppelin, the White Stripes, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana have all covered his tracks. Huddie William Ledbetter was an influential American folk and blues musician at the turn of the 20th century, admired as the king of the 12-string guitar. Online retailers are also getting in on the act – services such as .uk or will print a physical photo album from Facebook posts.īut it is not just words and images that we risk losing for ever. Nearly 5m UK-based websites will be preserved for the historical record, with regular snapshots taken so future historians can track how webpages evolve over time. This effort received a huge boost in 2013 when the non-print legal deposit regulations came into force and allowed the British Library, as well as the five other UK deposit libraries, including those at Oxford and Cambridge universities and Trinity College Dublin, to archive all digitally published material. ![]() Since 2004, it has been working to archive websites for future generations, just like paper-based literature. In the UK, the British Library is taking bold steps to rectify what it refers to as the “digital black hole”, where information is lost once it is taken down from a webpage or an entire site shuts down. In 2010, the US Library of Congress signed an agreement with Twitter to archive public tweets sent since the platform’s birth in 2006, and to continue preserving tweets to make this data available for analysis and research. There are some attempts to preserve this digital data. ![]()
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