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MEMORY LOSS
Want to keep those videos of Baby's first steps forever? For a start, don't keep them on videotape.

Text: DON TAPSCOTT

With all the computers, camcorders, digital cameras, voice recorders, PDAs and other AV wizardry sitting around the average house, we're far and away history's most documented and chronicled generation. But these are the early years of the digital revolution, and standards and formats used for storing information constantly change. The upshot is that only a small fraction of the gigabytes of lovingly crafted, vibrant multimedia memories we record today will survive more than a decade. Machines won't exist to play the material - remember Betamax? The software will be obsolete or the tapes will have rotted. Videotaped school Christmas concerts will go poof.

Unless you pull up your technological socks, it's doubtful your great-grand kids will ever see your picture or hear your voice. They'll go through family albums, read old correspondence, watch home videos and you won't be there. There might be lots of photos and letters from your mom and dad 30 years ago, but no you.

This isn't speculation on my part; the crisis of digital obsolescence is well underway. NASA has warehouses of data on magnetic tapes from early space missions that it can't use because the machines to read the tapes were put out of commission decades ago. Libraries and archivists are struggling with boxcars of donated computer tapes and disks from government leaders that can't be read and have started to decay. Want to examine satellite pictures of the Amazon Basin from 30 years ago to see how much deforestation has occurred? The images exist; they just can't be retrieved. It's easy to read one of Shakespeare's handwritten manuscripts from the 1500s, but if an aspiring Bard from the 1980s composed his prose on a Wang word processor, it's a goner.

When the digital era arrived, it offered the promise of perfectly preserving data forever in bits and bytes. Librarians loved on-line data banks of newspapers, magazines and journals because they are much more usable than reams of microfilm. But library budgets are being squeezed by the constant upgrades in hardware and software needed to keep the material useful.

A few wealthy publications, such as The New York Times, recognize the importance of being readily accessible and have begun to digitize decades worth of their own back issues. This puts the Times' version of history at the fingertips of any researcher in the world, guaranteeing the newspaper will be cited in the work of students and historians while other non-digitized papers will be ignored.

In the long run, say 10 or 20 years from now, the problem will no doubt sort itself out. By then, material produced will be easily archived since much of the technology will have matured and become standardized, just as VHS triumphed over Betamax. However, until then, many families are going to have entire decades of precious memories lost in digital limbo.

If you don't want to suffer this fate, somebody has to consciously play the role of the family digital content archivist.

Do you send out an annual family newsletter? Start keeping a paper copy. Print out as many back issues as you can. Digital copies on many early word processing programs will soon be useless if they aren't already. See if you can import the files into current word processing programs, and save the file as ASCII text.

Have lots of digital photos? Archive them in a non-proprietary format, such as TIFF or JPEG. Are you archiving them onto CD-Rs? Buy brand name CDs that will survive for many decades. And buy a printer that produces photos that will survive more than a few years. It's worth the extra money.

Have home videos on VHS or Hi-8? It will soon be time to dub them over to DVD, but you should wait until the format battle for recordable DVDs is resolved.

I'm optimistic a few smart companies will recognize there is a market for managing today's digital memories. As bandwidth expands and storage costs plunge, I will simply copy files, home videos and digital photos to an on-line equivalent of a bank's safety deposit box. They'll protect my information and do all the necessary software manipulations to keep my content current.

Until this happens, we're on our own. I know for some of my stuff I'm already too late. I'm heartbroken that I've lost forever many early e-mails with my kids while I was on the road. And I'd love to have the e-mail my daughter once wrote to Santa.

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