Decaying Electronic Archives
Turns out old-fashioned paper does do one or two things that digital media can’t–it lasts, and its technology doesn’t go out of date. Today’s New York Times features a long article about a fairly recent phenomenon in the field of writers’ archives: digital-born materials, meaning writing that was created, and only exists, on hard drives, disks, and other computerized storage media. The article focuses on Emory’s Salman Rushdie archive, which contains a number of old Mac computers that the archivists haven’t yet decided how to preserve and present.
Here’s an excerpt: “Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits–0’s and 1’s–written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper.
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