Standing in the shadow of an utlra-secure storage facility underneath a mountain in the Swiss Alps, these two men hold in their hands a lock box (actually, it's a time capsule) that contains, well, the bits of our digital heritage. It's not just lots of zeros and ones, but also the documentation they think will be necessary to preserve those zeros and ones in the years to come.
At left is Andreas Rauber, a professor at the Vienna University of Technology. At right is Adam Farquhar, head of digital library technology at the British Library. Both are involved in the multi-year Planets project, funded by the European Union to the tune of more than 18 million dollars.
Think of the Planets project as the digital equivalent of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. The consortium of public and private organizations involved in Planets want to make sure that we conserve what they call our "digital genome."
The problem is one you're probably familiar with, especially if you still have college term papers stored on floppy disks in your attic. Our technology quickly outpaces what we store on it, and that's a potential nightmare for archivists, who really, really like to not just store things, but keep them accessible and usable.
Farquhar puts it this way: "Unlike stone which lasts for tens of thousands of years, or information on parchment, which might last for thousand years, or paper that lasts for 100 years, digital information -- especially on the kinds of media that we store on today -- can decay in just a few years."So the Planets project has been looking at ways to preserve your PDFs, JPEGs, Quicktime Movies and the like for the moment (and it will come) when those formats become ancient, unknown and unreadable to some future computing technology.
Their idea was to create a time capsule filled with five common file types (those listed above, plus a website and a small Java program), and also all the documentation someone in the future might need to access and understand those files. That includes things like schematics for assembling devices like a CD drive!
But its more complex than that.
"Contrary to a book or a photograph, you can't just take the file and look at it. You need software to render it for you," notes Rauber. You could provide the appropriate viewer with the object but, "then you need the specific operating system that the viewer was written for. And even if you keep the operating system, then you need a computer to install that operating system on...and so on."
You get the idea. More and more of our information is being stored in more and more ways on more and more different kinds of devices. "It's nothing short of terrifying," says Farquhar.
However, the team believes it has made a good start with the time capsule. The idea is to open it up some years from now and assess how they did. In the meantime, you'll soon be able to see a virtual version of the time capsule for yourself.
Oh, and as for the secure location, which they're calling the Swiss Fort Knox?
"Have you ever seen a James Bond film?" jokes Farquhar. "The facility is underneath a mountain. Absolutely serious security. Armed guards on duty. One vault door after another. So, we have a very high level of confidence that no one will be able to disturb the time capsule until it's time has come."
For the sake of all those thousands of JPEGs (most out of focus..) I have of my daughter's fourth birthday party, I hope he and the rest of the Planets team are right... Photo: Courtesy of the Planets Project
Tags: Computer Software, Computers, Electronics
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