Century-Scale Storage ⇥ lil.law.harvard.edu

Maxwell Neely-Cohen, writing for Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab:

This piece looks at a single question. If you, right now, had the goal of digitally storing something for 100 years, how should you even begin to think about making that happen? How should the bits in your stewardship be stored with such a target in mind? How do our methods and platforms look when considered under the harsh unknowns of a century? There are plenty of worthy related subjects and discourses that this piece does not touch at all. This is not a piece about the sheer volume of data we are creating each day, and how we might store all of it. Nor is it a piece about the extremely tough curatorial process of deciding what is and isn’t worth preserving and storing. It is about longevity, about the potential methods of preserving what we make for future generations, about how we make bits endure. If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it? That’s it.

This was published in December but I only read it today. Here is the thing: I am going to read a lot of stuff this year, but I already know this is going to be one of my favourite essays. Well told and beautifully designed. Make the time for this thoughtful work.