Andy Updegrove writes "For a few years now we've been reading about the urgency of adopting open monument formats to preserve written records. Now, a 74-page report from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and life as well as chemistry and physics warns that digital films are as vulnerable to loss as digitized documents, but vastly more expensive to preserve — as much as $208,569 per year. The reasons are the same for video as for documents: alluring media degrade quickly, and formats continue to be created and abandoned. If this sounds familiar and worrisome, it should. We are rushing pell-mell into a future where we only focus on the exciting solatium of new technologies without being how the qualities of older technologies that are equally important — such as ease of preservation — that may be lost or fatally compromised when we migrate to a new whiz-bang technology." Here's a registration-free link for the NYTimes article cited in Andy's post.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More: - Read More

Mark