Heritage and conservation Is the memory of humanity in danger?

The world's digital heritage is likely to be lost to posterity, "warns UNESCO in October 2003, in a public letter that highlighted the causes of the threat: the obsolescence of computers and computer programs, uncertainty about "The evolution of digital technology has been so fast and onerous that governments and institutions have not been able to develop strategies for conservation in a timely manner. " It was one of those messages that fell like a bombshell. but it has been diluted a few days ago, no one remembers it, today the Cloud is our last act of faith, the carefree liberation of public and private heritage in the network spaces. , a lot of what we do, write and photograph now. is online, it seems rebaduring, but the question arises alone: ​​until when?

The hope of the eternity of the Cloud is based on a technical reasoning (the physical medium is avoided with the risk of attrition) p But it weakens when its limits are weighed, such that the speed of production of the material and the energy flow that the servers need. We live in a world of uncontrolled digital expansion, which in 2013 occupied 4.4 zettabytes (1 ZB represents a billion gigabytes) and grows ten times more in 2020: almost as many bits as stars in the world. # 39; universe. Memory capacity is increasing at a slower rate than data generation. Pessimists believe that only a revolution like quantum computing could preserve everyone's files, all the time, for free and online.

Librarian Silvana Piga, who coordinates the special collections and archives of the Max von Buch Library of the University of San Andrs found a climate of mistrust in the Cloud by traveling to a Digitization training meeting organized by the University of Edinburgh. The Scots possessed a double file of the scientific publications they received: subscription to digital databases and preservation of printed versions under controlled conditions of temperature and humidity. "It's a pivotal moment, which generates a lot of doubts," says Piga. "US universities are buying space in the cloud, but nobody knows what happens if access is cut, what changes in the future or how data security works."

In the heat of the Second World War and the intrigues of espionage, no one thought of the future. An advertisement from a manufacturer in the 1980s encouraged: "Microfilm and throw the originals". It was tempting. The files that once occupied a room are suddenly entered into four microfilm rolls. Although the rolls may last a hundred or so years, the technology has been replaced within a few decades. "Now they tell you to scan everything, that's another mistake," says Piga, who has 20,000 handwritten letters from the British and Irish community in Argentina, a collection that includes the 1825 correspondence and testimonials from the first Scottish colony guarded by seals. "I have the impression of working with dinosaurs," he says honestly. "But if these people had used Gmail, today they will not have anything."

At the Vatican

Something similar will be said by the Secret Vatican Archives. A few steps from the Sistine Chapel, its 40 million documentary pages include the Codex Vaticanus (the oldest transcript of the fourth century), the papal bull excommunicating Martn Luther and an excerpt from the process. at Galileo Galilei. From its twelve centuries of history divided into 85 kilometers of shelves, only a few pages have been scanned and converted to digital text. Things can change with the project In Codice Ratio of the Roma Tre University, which combines artificial intelligence with optical recognition software to track damaged texts and transcribe them. "If it succeeds, it will be able to open an incalculable quantity of documents in the historical archives of the whole world", anticipates the end of April The Atlantic .

Before uploading our files to the Cloud, Format changes helped put our feet on Earth. We knew that content could disappear: there is data that is erased, sites that are lost, information that no longer exists. Although sometimes we have forgotten it. To celebrate the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book – a general record of England – the BBC launched in 1986 the Domesday Project, a large multimedia library on everyday life in Britain. Some 50,000 photos and 25,000 cards were stored in twelve LaserDiscs, a promising format? that a decade later, it had practically disappeared. After a group of experts managed to resurrect the archive with emulation techniques, in 2011 Domesday Reloaded was, this time, available on the Internet.

The expiry of the LaserDisc (as before that of the floppy disks of 5 and 3, the Zip and the CD ROM, the DVD and the Blu-Ray) is the visible face of a scary concept, l & # 39; Technological obsolescence: the inability to use software or hardware as technology evolves or external factors such as moisture, electrical faults, biological fungi and computer viruses. Dynamics becomes irritating with planned obsolescence: design and manufacturing techniques that limit the service life when components continue to function. At the end of last year, France became the third country (after the United States and Israel) to question Apple for these practices, when a consumer badociation denounced to the prosecution that the iPhone 6 and 7 had slowed down. purpose after updating the operating system.

Digital Archaeologist

Whatever the case may be, obsolescence does not go away. The supports will simply continue to age. Some alternatives are the construction of computer museums (they retain all the equipment and old programs, more copies and repairs) and digital archeology, which looks a bit like a resignation. Like us, future generations will have to save the content of damaged media or old formats. "In the future, there will be archivists specializing in digital data recovery," says Piga.

However, unexpected support appeared. It is millions of years old, it can last for centuries and not be obsolete: the DNA, the memory of nature. Encryption methods allow a deoxyribonucleic acid sequence to store digital data in binary code. In January 2013, a team from the European Institute of Bioinformatics in England converted Shakespeare's 154 sonnets into DNA and 26 seconds from Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech. The data can be stored for two thousand years, which could reach a thousand if it is stored at 18 ° C below freezing at facilities such as World Bank Seed Svalbard, Norway.

Meanwhile, the University of Washington is advancing in a promising technique. In a paper presented in April 2016, its scientists and electronics engineers described the operation of a complete digital data storage system using DNA molecules. The team will code information from four image files into the nucleotide sequences (the organic compounds that make up the DNA strands) and reverse the process, retrieving the sequences for reconstruct the images. "Life has produced this fantastic molecule, which can successfully store any type of information," said Luis Ceze, one of the team members. "We reuse it to store photos, videos and documents in a manageable way, for hundreds or thousands of years."

With this method, the information that now fills the space of a hypermarket will occupy the size of a sugar field. After centuries of research outside, the solution was inside.

Source. The nation