With the advent of electronic forms of communication and storage, there is a problem that some have been aware of for years, but hasn’t dawned on much of the public yet.

What happens when the tools you created your works with become obsolete?

Increased reliance on electronic storage in the ever-volatile technology realm could be a huge problem in years to come. As the technology progresses, but the original creation does not, there is a real danger that the data could become unreadable. Either the software used to create the document won’t be available, or the hardware necessary to run it can’t be found in working order. The term some news articles have used for this possible impending loss of information is “digital dark age”.

The most recent and probably most famous case of this was written about in December. For the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book, a comprehensive chronicle of people and land in 1085, the British Broadcasting Corporation put together an archive of British life in the mid-1980s. It included photographs, writings and video clips, placed on two “virtually indestructible interactive video discs,” as The Independent described them.

But the hardware needed to view the files became obsolete. “To the embarrassment of the corporation, the massive project has been inaccessible for 16 years,” said The Independent.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the original Domesday could still be read, but the works from 1986 — 14 years back — were unreadable.

It took three years of work by the Camileon project, working partly at the University of Michigan, to recover the files. By using an emulator of the BBC computer and disc player originally used, it was possible to see work celebrated and then lost within the same generation.

On this side of the pond, accessibility of archives is faring no better. An Associated Press article on Jan. 16 reported that records from NASA were in the same boat as the BBC project. Joe Miller, a neurobiologist at University of South Carolina, was trying to read magnetic tapes from the 1976 Viking landings on Mars.

But the data format was unknown. “All the programmers had died or left NASA,” Miller said. “It was hopeless to try to go back to the original tapes.” He ended up tracking down paper printouts and hiring students to retype everything.

Even something now as everyday and ubiquitous as the Internet smiley 🙂 could not have its origin traced until staff and students at Carnegie Mellon University combed through magnetic tape backups, finding its first use in a discussion thread on Sept. 19, 1982.

So people have gone to great lengths to recover NASA archives and capsules of life. What happens when we begin dealing with the mundane — the photographs that grace your scrapbooks and perhaps desks in your room? You can probably go home and pull out rolls of film developed in the late 1980s or early 1990s with no problem. They’ll be perfectly accessible, even if the particular film style used for them isn’t around now. Retrieving old report cards and papers, if you kept them, will be just as easy.

But for kids being born today, their entire existence may only be cataloged in stacks of CDs full of JPEG files. Those JPEGs may be readable, but what happens when compression degrades the quality of the photo, and what about the original files? Electronic report cards could leave no record, unless the effort is taken to print them. Other work can be just as troublesome. The AP article used files once created with WordStar and later moved to Microsoft Word as an example. “‘The spacing of the characters and stuff on pages may be off, so lines get a little bit longer and carry over onto the next line,’ said Steve Gilheany of Archive Builders, a records-management consultancy. ‘Gradually those errors become more of a problem.'”

The solution on the surface is to print everything out. However, the sheer volume of what you want to save — both written and photographed — can make this impossible, and the quality of the paper has a marked effect on how long it remains in readable or usable condition.

Researchers are trying to work out solutions for digital archiving. One group is working with Adobe to develop an archival-quality version of files in PDF. As usual, Microsoft plays with a deck of wild cards, forcing its “standards” onto nearly everyone and producing general trouble with standard formats or even Microsoft’s own previous ones. Because of this, you’ll have a better chance of recovering those industry-standard JPEG files than most word processing documents and spreadsheets.

With this threat of a “digital dark age” bearing down on us, it’s good to know that there are dedicated individuals who are working to recover what even now is disappearing. Otherwise, those 5 1/4-inch floppy disks with AppleWorks documents I wrote in elementary school will be as useless as the punch cards once used by the Census Bureau.

Jeff Morrison is a junior in journalism and mass communication and political science from Traer. He is the wire editor of the Daily.