Losing It: A Contrarian's Thoughts on Digital Content Retention

摘要

I wrote a column about digital archiving last August/September, addressing some of the problems and some solutions now being worked on. That was a serious column in keeping with the gravity of the situation. This is a semi-facetious follow-up. Life, serious and lighthearted, goes on―and digital content keeps proliferating. Not only can't we retain everything, maybe we shouldn't try. What would future researchers do with billions of petabytes of everyday digital content anyway?