Digital preservation: Environment factors

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	Long term realities Environment factors
	Why science fiction? A story, The Time Tombs, in JG Ballard's The Venus Hunters, describes desert tomb robbing a couple of millennia hence. The robbers are not after gold and silver, however. The treasures are tapes that, when the tomb is disturbed, create a virtual reality image of the buried person: virtual equivalents of the well-known portraits from Roman Egypt. It is plausible that these tapes (and the machines to play them) have survived just as physical objects in Eyptian tombs have done. The sealed tombs would create a completely stable and atmosphere, with minimal humidity, no gaseous pollution, no dust and low oxygen levels. Even virtual objects have to reside in physical media, so these factors apply to them equally. We are familiar with the amazing preservation of objects from the tombs of ancient Egypt. Such objects include actual documents written on papyrus. Other examples are the quantities of documents found in the Mogao caves in China, which survive from the 9th century AD. There are, of course, many examples of documents surviving from even earlier dates. In many cases, such survivals happen without conscious intervention from people. If we want to create conditions for long term survival we have to go to extraordinary lengths to create suitable environmental conditions, using air conditioning, sealed cases, and so on. But JG Ballard's story is improbable. It is unlikely that people in future millennia will happen on survivals from the dawn of the Information Age that have not been subject to conscious and active preservation. But you never know. Even now people are willing to go to considerable lengths to decipher operating systems for long deceased machines - from all of 50 years ago!
	Practical challenges Preservation policies Retrieval and identification Technical obsolescence Physical deterioration Authenticity	Long term realities Intrinsic value Ownership factors Social / political factors Environment factors	Any answers? International actions ********* About the author