Abstract Detail
Historical KASS, LEE B [1]. On Losing our History in the Digital Dark Age. Will future historians look back at our time and find nothing? Will computer programs be unreadable, and worthless to historians? Are current digital online volumes and journals misleading? Have archives of digital content already been lost? These and similar questions have recently been broached by Vint Cerf, a "father of the internet", who predicted that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost. Cornell University Archivists believe “electronic files will be lost and some of them will be very important.” And Cornell IT staff told me that the only way to safely save documents is to print them out. I will present current examples of digital losses already encountered for Academic Journals, misleading publication dates, loss of email correspondence and databases, caused by computer program changes.
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1 - Cornell University and West Virginia University
Keywords:
Digital Dark Ages
unreadable computer programs
lost digital content.
Presentation Type: Oral Paper
Session: 34, Historical Section Contributed Papers
Location: 200/Savannah International Trade and Convention Center
Date: Tuesday, August 2nd, 2016
Time: 5:00 PM
Number: 34006
Abstract ID:658
Candidate for Awards:None | 
