says Katie Cincotta
There is a part of me that still wonders if, as the move to the 'cloud' gathers pace, there will be people who store everything about themselves online. And, at some point in the future will people be required to sort through the accounts of those who have died and are taking up useful server space be deleted* ... and then what will happen to all the interesting detritus that washed into the future from the past? Now we get letters from great grandma, stashed inside the wardrobe that is to be sold because she has finally died, implicating her in a wild fling with some famous rock star which leads to all sorts of explanations as to actual family descent ... *G*
Not to mention that by maintaining things on paper does leave one the option of ultimate destruction of evidence, but should those embarrassing thoughts be bit-mapped to some server in some other jurisdiction ... who knows who would read that material?
All sorts of questions as to how things are organised, accessed, documented, unalterable (which is possible with paper, but not so much so with electronica), recoverable in the future. All the sorts of questions that records managers and librarians have tackled over the years and were starting to get some sort of handle on, now need to be reexamined in light of what is now understood to be 'good professional practice'. How will that change? Be altered to accommodate the finality of a drive being formatted to remove from existence incriminating evidence of wrong doing? I'm fairly sure that there are folk somewhere starting to think about this, but even so ...
Questions. That's all I have at the moment. No answers. Not even vague ideas as to how it can all be managed.
Except that, should the apocalypse happen there will be probably no electricity to spare for such 'fripperies' as leaving it all online, which at least would save us the energy of wondering how to manage it all.
*Anne Mccaffrey's "Silent Drums" again.
LAST century we said goodbye to personal generators such as the water wheel, and most of the developed world plugged into the new electric grid, giving us high voltage on the wire with long-distance transmission. Now computers are set to make the big switch, transferring computer power and storage from our humble hard drives to the "cloud" - where everything happens on the internet.
There is a part of me that still wonders if, as the move to the 'cloud' gathers pace, there will be people who store everything about themselves online. And, at some point in the future will people be required to sort through the accounts of those who have died and are taking up useful server space be deleted* ... and then what will happen to all the interesting detritus that washed into the future from the past? Now we get letters from great grandma, stashed inside the wardrobe that is to be sold because she has finally died, implicating her in a wild fling with some famous rock star which leads to all sorts of explanations as to actual family descent ... *G*
Not to mention that by maintaining things on paper does leave one the option of ultimate destruction of evidence, but should those embarrassing thoughts be bit-mapped to some server in some other jurisdiction ... who knows who would read that material?
All sorts of questions as to how things are organised, accessed, documented, unalterable (which is possible with paper, but not so much so with electronica), recoverable in the future. All the sorts of questions that records managers and librarians have tackled over the years and were starting to get some sort of handle on, now need to be reexamined in light of what is now understood to be 'good professional practice'. How will that change? Be altered to accommodate the finality of a drive being formatted to remove from existence incriminating evidence of wrong doing? I'm fairly sure that there are folk somewhere starting to think about this, but even so ...
Questions. That's all I have at the moment. No answers. Not even vague ideas as to how it can all be managed.
Except that, should the apocalypse happen there will be probably no electricity to spare for such 'fripperies' as leaving it all online, which at least would save us the energy of wondering how to manage it all.
*Anne Mccaffrey's "Silent Drums" again.
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