We are all engaged in expression whilst contributing to this forum and rightly so. The questions I have are simple For how long are our thoughts, expressions, beliefs, opinions, views and ideals held within the electronic media. Will the input be around within two month, two years or two hundred years. Will our children be able to access the views of their parents, grandparents etc.
Will these contributions be archived anywhere.
And if so where?

Originally posted by bulldog D

Will these contributions be archived anywhere.
And if so where?

Does google not keep a archive? :confused:

I think the reply to that is, how long will Google or indeed the internet in general be around for? We don't know what advances are around the corner, and the internet could one day be obsolete, so if/when that day arrives will all of our efforts on forums like this be wasted? Or will it somehow be archived? I think that's the point of this thread anyway.

It would be easy to archive the forum - I've used vBulletin myself and you can easily save the database off to CDRM or DVD or whatever.

However, the wider problem of archiving high-tech communications is a good one. I can pick up a book printed in English in the 17th Century and make quite a lot of sense from it. However, a floppy disc containing the manuscript I wrote for my sceond book on the BBC Microcomputer requires a BBC B with disc drive, some luck that the disc hasn't been corrupted in the meantime, the software I used to write the book and so on. As more of our records get on to computers, it's increasingly difficult to see how future archivists will be able to make sense of them, unless they have a battery of different computers and media readers, and we kepe refreshing the media every few years to ensure stuff doesn't rot. I guess the only sure fire way is to print everything out on archive quality, acid free paper.

BUT.....what matters with forums like this is the result on our lives. If this were a short story or poetry site, then the words are the message and the medium, and so to retain the value of the site you would have to keep everthing. But the Forum is an ideas and discussion and communication site; what matters is teh ideas and they get carried around in the heads of those who read and ocntribute, so perhaps in a very real sense the meaning of SF survives as long as the impact of SF threads on people's hearts and minds survives.

Joe

I know that Geoff does back up the Forum, but it does raise the interesting question about what would happen if he didn't?

If Geoff went under a bus tomorrow (sorry Geoff ;)) where would the future of the content lie?

Considering the enormous and amazing resource the SF (and other like it) has become maybe there should be some strategy by archivists to record and store such media.

It's a big issue across the world, Tony. Archiving off the data is easy peasy - kepeing it accessible is the bit that's taxing the brains of folks.

I have 20 year old discs here that are readable within the right equipment and with the corrcet operating system, but I also have stuff for which I no longer have the software and that is not readable in new software - Some time ago I had to go grubbing around for a copy of a free format database package called Lotus Agenda to get access to some files I created years ago.

In front of me now I have some stuff I wrote 20 years ago that I want to use again, and the easiest way to get to that point will be to either scan or re-type the text.

It's a very interesting problem - the only way I can see this being resolved ultimately will be to have media that also includes the playback mechanism. In the George Pal version of 'The Time Machine' (not that most recent pile of pooh, the good old 1950s version) there were 'talking rings' which the hero found and set spinning on a table top, that then played back the informtaion held in them. Perhaps we need to look at ways in which an archival storage device could have within it the means of playing back content in as accessible a form as possible without any other kit being needed.

Maybe we nede to be like the bods in Fahrenheit 451 and each of us memorise chunks of stuff....;)

Joe

Analog storage for thousands of years (http://www.norsam.com/hdrosetta.htm)

vBB backs up the forum for us, check out the bottom of every page:

http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/archive