[Long] [OT] That Big Shadow Over Your Shoulder, Part 1,wasRe: [Coco] OS Vulnerabilities

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 12:46 PM 2/29/04 -0800, Neil Morrison wrote:
>For archival purposes WP51 is a good possibility, although perhaps
>HTML is now more universal.

Isn't this whole archiving business a drag? We face it with the CoCo stuff,
and fortunately there is a great group of emulators out there, together
with an increasing number of online archives.

But what of other documents? As a former librarian, the long-term archivist
for several arts groups, and an audio restoration service provider
(http://maltedmedia.com/), this is a big concern. If you save HTML, which
version? When do browsers stop support of previous DTDs? It's gone so fast
that earlier HTML already displays defectively -- and this is only a single
decade down the line.

I've been dumping as much stuff online, into formats with at least a little
future (CD, DVD, and even paper), but what next? How is this all dealt
with? Who cares if, say, my stuff gets lost -- but a whole generation's
worth? I can't help mulling over the loss of MP3.com -- perhaps many of you
weren't especially interested in it, but consider: MP3.com was sold and the
entire archive of music on hard drives was *erased*. Because the buying
company didn't want to deal with getting new agreements from artists (and,
based on the language of previous agreements, it didn't really have to --
they were just lazy and protecting their corporate buttoxen), they erased
the largest single archive of music in human history, in the stroke of a pen.

I wrote a piece about archiving last year
(http://maltedmedia.com/books/papers/sl-archv.html), and always welcome
additional updates on how to solve this problem. I haven't yet put the
MP3.com addendum to it.

Dennis