Interesting article in today’s NYTimes about libraries learning to receive and deal with digital materials such as primary writings of authors. How to store them, keep them currently useable and also how to keep them accessible in their original state. Love that expression “born digital” meaning work that was conceived onto digital format and influenced by being so born.
The most interesting bits of the article introduced the idea of how writing on a computer impacts the act of writing. This is something long-discussed: your materials influence your work as well as your mastery of those materials and the process of using them.
The title of the article by Patricia Cohen, Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit, harkens to what we’re always advising people with a lot of stuff on their computers and a progression of computers: have to keep an ear to the ground so you know that floppies are starting to go away, now zip disks, CDs are now replaced by USB drives etc. That way you’ll have hardware to access those old, I mean archival, files rather than just a room full of big and small floppy disks to stare at.
This question surely looms for archiving libraries and research centers on a larger scale!
