The difficulties of preserving documents over the ages

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There was at least one master artist in the world 17,300 years ago. We
know this because of paintings on the walls of a cave in Lascaux. The
preservation of this art was made possible in part because nobody knew about the cave for a very long time. The down side is that, if the artist was trying to send a message, we don't know what the message was. Even if there had been runes in an ancient language, we likely have no one who would be able to translate them.

If you had a document to preserve 2,500 years ago, you could paint or etch it onto the wall of a temple or pyramid. The down side is that your message might have something to do with recording how many potatoes or cattle you sold to someone who has no living descendants around to care much about it. And even if the message was about royal blood lines, well, even the best of the lines petered out after a while.

Paper was all the rage for documents a thousand years ago. Some paper records from that era still survive in readable form. The down side is that the Church had no hesitation about burning documents that contradicted church teachings. Nazis and Communists and the odd Savonarola also took advantage of the fact that paper burns quite readily. And then there were some very effective bombs that could reduce archives to ashes.

Seventy years ago, paper was still being used for documents, though archivists were unhappy about the poor quality of the paper that things were being printed on, due to the war.

By sixty years ago, archivists were focusing their efforts on microfilming projects and the use of acid-free paper. We may never know how long microfilm would have lasted in readable condition [it does require proper storage conditions, of course, which would prevent indefinite usability], because digitizing efforts began to render it redundant. Digitizing has its own hazards, however. The computer languages that were in use in the 1950s have been obsolete for a long time. Governments have to pay people to master those languages so that content from old databases can still be retrieved.

Twenty-five years ago, floppy discs were in reasonably wide use. I used them to record book orders in the library I worked in. Today, it's unlikely that any floppy disc would still be readable by today's computers, even supposing that you could find machinery to read them with.

Twenty years ago, diskettes were being used instead of floppies. It might still be possible to find diskette readers, though the computer language used by diskettes from twenty years ago would likely be incompatible with Microsoft Word 2013. Fifteen years ago, most computers on the market had CD drives. Many still do. Again, if you have a 1998-vintage document on a CD-ROM, you need to update it to a more recent [2003 or 2005, say] Word file if you want it to still be readable.

Ten years ago, patrons at my library began to come in with what they called Flash drives. I believe that the technical term for these is USB. They are easy to lose or misplace. I know, because I often
had to help library patrons find theirs.

Five years ago, there was something called the Cloud, which stored documents. Google had a storage site as well. The down side will come in 2027 when [according to the comic strip "Zippy"] the Cloud will cease to exist. Google's storage facilities will disappear if and when Google itself ceases to exist.

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