Good day to everyone! After a nice anniversary vacation with my wife and a not-so-nice bout of stomach flu that followed, I'm back, all settled in, and scouring the recesses of the Internet and my rusty brain for interesting discussion items.
How I could have missed this one, I'm really not sure. I first read about the death of digital documents a couple months ago, and for whatever reason, it didn't occur to me to share. Well, let's correct that oversight :)
Chew on this: The Digital Ice Age
It seems the world is rushing to get every last bit of information available into digital format (Google Library Project, anyone?). The rationale behind this is that by digitizing the contents of every written object available, we'll preserve it in perpetuity; at least that's one of many reasons, but a big one.
Somewhere around the Mediterranean, there's a long dead and buried scholar laughing at us from beyond. He managed to preserve a bunch of scrolls for more than 2,000 years with some degree of success, and we, with our infinite technology and mental capacity, can't read a stupid document we wrote 15 years ago.
It wasn't all that long ago the paperless office was touted as the future of business. It seems making everything digital is about as smart as printing books on thermal paper. It's a proposed death sentence for your documents. The only question is whether you've guessed at a digital format that will die later than its alternatives, or whether taking on the gargantuan responsibility of ensuring all your digital documentation is continually converted to a readable format in the future will be the death of you!
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