My second Udemy course, Personal Digital Preservation, is now available! The regular price for enrolling is $16, but for readers of this blog (and anyone else you want to tell!) it’s just $10 with the coupon code DATALITH10. That code is good through the end of February.
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Some time after his death in 1991, Roddenberry’s estate discovered almost 200 floppies of his. They went to a company called DriveSavers Data Recovery, which took years to recover the documents due to the unusual challenges. They’ve now - Gary McGath, Freelance Technical Writer
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DOTS: Almost a datalith
A lot of people in digital preservation are convinced a “digital dark age” is nothing to worry about. I’ve consistently disagreed with this. The notion that archivists will replace outdated digital media every decade or two through the centuries is a pipe dream. Records have always gone through periods of neglect, and they will in the future. Periods of unrest will happen; authorities will try to suppress inconvenient history; groups like Daesh will set out to destroy everything that doesn’t match their worldview; natural disasters will disrupt archiving.
I’ve proposed the idea of a “datalith,” a data record made out of rock or equivalent material, optically readable and self-explanatory assuming a common language survives. DOTS, Digital Optical Technology System, is burned on tape rather than engraved in stone, but in every other respect it matches my vision of a datalith. It can store digital images in any format but also allows them to be recorded as a visual representation. The Long Now Foundation explains:
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Tagged datalith, preservation