If you’re old enough to remember using WordStar, the most prominent word-processing program (long before Microsoft Word) in the early days of computers, you can understand this conundrum: Digital archives are much more fragile than good old paper archives.
Sounds backward, doesn’t it? But Vicky McCargar, a senior editor at the Los Angeles Times and a member of two international teams researching digital preservation, lays out the issue extremely well in an excellent article in the Seybold Report.
She cites a number of examples and concerns, including this one: “WordStar, a nearly ubiquitous word processor in the 1970s and 1980s, is often held up as the poster child for digital obsolescence. No current word processing programs will open a WordStar file, and the company stopped manufacturing the software in 1991. Cracking old WordStar files now amounts to a hobby for computer enthusiasts.” (Most of those WordStar files, of course, are probably written on 5 1/2-inch floppy disks. Anyone out there have a 5 1/2-inch floppy drive left in your computer?)
Ironically, in her post to the wonderful News Librarians list (where I first learned of the piece), McCargar says the article is “temporarily available online.” (There’s a delicious twist in there somewhere.) So if you want to read it, download it quickly, before it disappears.
The Scary Fragility of Digital Archives
