Preserving Digital Content
Sun Jul 9 15:14:44 EDT 2006
Everyone is in a rush to put things into digital form these days. I think starting digital has advantages, mainly from a searching standpoint, but there is also a dark side. Paper and other physical materials last a long time, often hundreds or even thousands of years. Home made CDs have a life of a few decades at most, and perhaps less. Even hard drives and disks only last a few decades. The digital preservation coalition has an excellent article on the challenges of preserving digital files that details some of the issues.
In sunday school today our lesson was on journal writing, and some one brought up electronic journals. I am in favor, and in fact keep my journal electronically myself, but I also brought up the problem of compatability and legacy formats and software. I've been familiarizing myself with my dad's family history work, which has used several DOS based legacy software packages. The life of electronic data in a proprietary format is only about 5 years, and that is assuming that the company has long term viability and believes in backwards compatability.
My Dad's family history uses DBase 4 as a programming framework and database store. It uses Wordstar format for the text files. My only saving point is that he documented his database structure and he is still around to ask questions of. I did find a tool that will migrate dbase 4 tables into MySQL tables, unfortunately I couldn't get it to compile on my computer, which turns out because it requires an old version of the MySQL libraries. I managed to install the dbf2mysql package, but had to downgrade the MySQL libraries. Once I got the tables into MySQL I went back to the current libraries and uninstalled dbf2mysql. I am still trying to figure out what to do with the Wordstar text and programming constructs. My preference would be to generate either xhtml or Latex format, which would then be easy to print. The problem is all of the linking and embedding between files and the fact that Dad's books are dynamically generated. I'll probably do the history and geneology separately. The geneology is going into a web based software package I bought that should allow broader access and update capability to the family. I'm still trying to figure out how to translate all of the history into a more modern and long term viable format.
