Friday, February 18, 2022

An Archive of Their Own

 As the early adapters among the silent and boomer generations go to the grave what happens to their digital archives?

As a failed historian I lean towards preserving every record, just because scholars have been able to wring meaning from the documentary evidence of the past, even when it's scant.  

As an active user of a Pc for close to 30 years, I know there's an infinitesimal chance that anything in my digital files would be of value to a future historian.  That's true in abstract, even more true given the lack of organization of the files.

A third factor is the ever-declining cost of storage, which leads to the logic of why not preserve it, because we don't know what future historians will be able to do using AI.

I suspect there's a niche for an archive service for personal digital files. That would differ from the services which archive what's on the internet.

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