Today Eric Rosenthal spoke in class and forwarned us that this will be the century without a history. As each progressive step of technology renders its predecessor obsolete, data will continually be lost. This will occur, Rosenthal claims, because data transfer may be impossible or near to it (hardly anyone has a floppy disk drive anymore), or else the storage medium will be destroyed before transfer occurs. Rosenthal said that the Library of Congress is working at a goal pace of 9 petabytes a day to transfer all of their data to a digital medium. Even at this rate, it would take the Library of Congress 1500 years to reach their goal. Digital mediums simply degrade, too. CD's can be destroyed by bacteria and other contamination, while hard drives typically survive anywhere from three to nine years.

I just read this article on Wired.com about the new breed of massive information storage centers built by Google, Microsoft, and others. I wonder what Rosenthal would have to say about what the article calls an architectural shift from PC hard drives back to massive data centers. The projection for the future of data storage is that everything will move from the PC hard drive and silicon chip to a centralized remote data center. Eric Schmidt from Google says of the plans for the new Google center in California, "When it's finished, the project will spread tens of thousands of servers across a few giant structures"--a "Googleplex" which will ultimately comprise 200 petabytes of hard disk storage.

The article is very interesting, but amidst concerns about the efficiency, size, and cost of the medium of data storage, concerns about the actual reliability of the medium are not to be found. Rosenthal claimed that no one is thinking about the problem of loss of digital information through disentigration, etc. I find it very hard to believe that the companies investing hundreds of millions of dollars in these facilities are not considering this possibility, but I could be wrong...