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----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The Digital Gap Be scared. At present, our digital information is doomed. I attended the Press Day at the Time & Bits: Managing Digital Continuity (http://www.ahip.getty.edu/timeandbits/intro.html) conference at the Getty Institute on February 10, 1998. The Getty sponsored the meeting so that a challenge can be raised to the uncritical acceptance of digital technology. There was a screening of Into the Future which was followed by a panel discussion with some of the meeting attendees. Into the Future premiered on PBS last month. Its filmmaker, Terry Saunders, presented the film. His first film concerning the loss of the human record was Slow Fires. When it premiered ten years ago, it brought public awareness to the need for microfilming of the rapidly decomposing libraries filled with acid-paper. It helped raise over $400 million towards book preservation. In making Into the Future, he hoped to raise a flag at the dire need to address the imminent loss of our digital human record. As he put together the film and spoke of its focus to people, the reaction was one of puzzlement. This is not an issue which the general population has considered. People would think a plan for preservation was built into technology, but nobody talks about it in the popular press: e.g. Bill Gates' The Road Ahead and Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital. Saunders claims these authors only focus on the information age without regard for the past. The panelists at the discussion: Steward Brand - Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of the Well, cofounder of Global Business Network, and author of book on the future Doug Carlston - Cofounder and CEO of Broderbund Software Brian Eno - Digital Musician, music producer and artist Danny Hillis - VP of R & D, the Walt Disney Company, a Disney Fellow and cofounder of Thinking Machines Corporation Brewster Kahle - Inventor and found of Wide Area Information Servers, Inc. [WAIS} and Founder of the Internet Archive Kevin Kelly - Executive Editor, Wired and author of Out of Control Peter Lyman - University Librarian, and professor in the School of Information Management & Systems at UCBerkeley Howard Besser - Digital archiving specialist, Adjunct Associate Professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management & Systems Margaret MacLean - Special Initiatives, Getty Conservation Institute Ben Davis - Program Manager, Communications, Getty Information Institute The meeting included other people who were not present at the discussion: Jaron Lanier, John Heilemann, Paul Saffo. The emerging theme of the meeting was that the consciousness of the public must be raised. The Digital Gap is here, we have lost and are losing much our digital legacy. Where the life of a Web page is only 70 days, our constantly evolving technology dooms us to an exponentially growing loss. The possibility exists, for the first time in recorded history, that no trace of information will be retrievable from a segment of our era. The panel consensus attempted to devise a means and a method for digital information preservation. The panel offered a small scale solution. Doug Carlston offered the idea of the Rosetta Stone vs. a Marathon. Make 1000 great books available for free on the web and also, at the same time, etch the same books into a media which will suffer little deterioration over time. This serves to counterbalance a widely disseminated version against a stable copy of the information from which later copies can always be compared. This is a beginning. Peter Lyman stressed, this is the first time since the 18th century new formats of information have emerged. His examples included: visualization, medical imaging, the Web and data collection. Society as a whole must rethink how we use, retrieve and store these new formats. Do you store just the bits? What about the relationships, the cultural context which add meaning to information? This was not addressed in any real form. The techies ruled the meeting, and the voice of cultural information retention was only addressed in Brian Eno's comments. The example he gave was that of an image of Malevich's White on White (1918) (http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~malek/Malevik.html) going digital. It will just look like a white square projected. It must retain its cultural resonance. The really hard thing in digital preservation is creating the meta languages/data which can be imbedded in the "bits." Two comments stood out. Danny Hillis' description of technology: *** "Technology is stuff that doesn't work. Digital is technology - but it is so cool that we're using it before it works" *** Brian Eno's acceptance of our loss of information. The realization that throughout history some information is always disappearing. "Forgetting," he said, "is as important as remembering" Adina Lerner Walt Disney Archives