With the multitude of data available on the web and in data storage facilities,
The rapidly dropping price of data storage has led computer scientists like Michael Lesk (a cyber-enthusiast to be sure) to claim that in the future, ‘there will be enough disk space and tape storage in the world to store everything people write, say, perform, or photograph.’ In other words, why delete anything from the current historical record if it costs so little save it? How might our history writing be different if all historical evidence were available?
In reading the Introduction to Digital Past: A Guide to Gathering and Preserving the Past on the Web, this portion was the most thought provoking.
If there is so much information, and none of it is being deleted, there is a potential for history and archives to get lost. Even when one searches through their own hard drive with a computer they have had for a number of years, finding that one photo from three years ago can take hours. If one doesn’t remember what they titled something or where they filed it under, the task of finding just a simple picture from a party is daunting.
The same can be said for storing history data. With so much information and data available in various locations, here is a potential for history to get lost within the digital data. If it is not adequately preserved and able to be found, regardless of how much information we can store if we cannot find it the data we are looking for, the data becomes useless. Not to sound too pessimistic about the woes of the internet and data land, we have the capacity to find and know just about everything about who we were in our history. However, there should be a means of finding our history amid the endless strings of data.
Another potential problems occurs when all of our data is lost. What can we do prevent our history from getting lost? Symantec, the computer virus preventing program, provides users with a way to store their data so nothing gets lost: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvIJuHectBY
It can be argued that the same process can be taken to protect our historical archives to not get lost.
Therefore, I have the following questions:
1. Is there a means that historians all store data? Is there a systematic way that historians know how to save a file of a certain type of document so it is easily accessible?
2. How can a historian find something adequately across borders and the internet? With so much data, doesn’t it become difficult to discover exactly what you want?