Deborah Tamborski asked about problems in archiving electronic  records
and if it would be "possible" to read them 50 years hence.

I  shall not attempt to top Bill Roach's brilliant explanation of  the
difficulties in keeping electronic documents viable but I do argue  that
it is most likely that our successors will be able to read  our
electronic files--if they really care to.  

Remember that  there was something like an 1,800 year gap between the
last Egyptian and the  first Frenchman who could read hieroglyphics.  To
read the Epic of  Gilgamesh linguists had to resurrect an alphabet and a
language that had been  dead for millennia and they did so without the
help of computers.  More  recently scholars did the same to read Mayan
inscriptions.  And with the  help of computers classical scholars are
beginning to read charred papyrus  scrolls from Pompeii and expect to
recover many ancient works.  A few  weeks ago there was an announcement
that a long-lost work of Euclid was  recovered even though a Christian
monk had scraped its words from the page  and written a book of prayers
over it.  

It would seem that the  only documents that are irretrievably lost are
those that have been  physically destroyed.  Are magnetic tapes, optical
disks, and  punch-cards really all that much different from clay tablets,
stone, and  organic media?

Paul R. Scott, CA, CRM
Records Management  Officer
Harris County, TX


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