Justice Department's Todd Blanche appointed acting Librarian of Congress

[lapfog_1]

26. I actually gave a lecture and served on a panel

at a Library of Congress seminar on Data Archival...

We have a major problem which has happened over the last 60 years or so... most of our data, things we would like to preserve for future generations, is electronic. Storing all of that data ( Exabytes of it now ) is one problem... actually solved by market forces and ever increasing density of new data storage devices. The problem is twofold, how do we keep the data around for 100s of years and, conversely, how do we keep providence of the data ( i.e. where is our proof that the data that is retrieved 100 years from now is still the original data ).

Both of these areas are something I happen to know quite a bit about since I was entrusted with keeping all of NASA's collected data on our solar system ( including all of the data on Planet Earth, sort of important to some the people here that are posting historical environmental data actually collected by NASA and NOAA in the MTPE ).

Your federal government spent billions of dollars getting that data... some the missions launched before I joined NASA are still sending back trickles of information to us. It would be sort of important to keep the data and make it easily usable by people in 2025 and 2050 and 2100, etc.

It's not just data storage devices that don't last that long, the computers that wrote it, the software that wrote it and can read it, the data formats, even the representation ( digital ) of the numbers has changed ( anyone remember 1's complement numeric encoding schemes? ). The only answer is to copy all of the data forward... and because you can't really determine what might be important, you have to copy it all... and port the software... and do it before the old storage hardware breaks ( just try and find 7 track 256 bpi reel to reel tape with vacuum draw tape drives... and if you could, what in the hell would you attach them to? )

Anyway, the Library of Congress sponsors research into these sorts of topics. Too bad Trump and his "personal attorney" will likely destroy it all.