Back when scientific publications came in paper form, libraries played a key role in ensuring that knowledge didn’t disappear. Copies went out to so many libraries that any failure—a publisher going bankrupt, a library getting closed—wouldn’t put us at risk of losing information. But, as with anything else, scientific content has gone digital, which has changed what’s involved with preservation.
Organizations have devised systems that should provide options for preserving digital material. But, according to a recently published survey, lots of digital documents aren’t consistently showing up in the archives that are meant to preserve it. And that puts us at risk of losing academic research—including science paid for with taxpayer money.
I’m skeptical. Even if archives are lost, authors will preserve their papers they feel are important. Who knows–it may even help to lose embarrassing papers and improve overall quality! But then it’s late and I’m jetlagged…
Not necessarily; most old, still-alive scientists still keep gigabytes of papers written by others on our hard drives. Most biological fields turn out to be surprisingly small, with few degrees of separation.
So it may come down to ‘Dr X died/got Alzheimers/retired to Florida last year, anybody have a copy of his paper on Y? It may be relevant to something I’m working on’?
I don’t know whether to be amused or terrified – so may settle for doing both.
As a (then) computer literate grad student, I was called on to transfer fortran programs supporting an emeritus professor’s publications to the new campus mainframe. I accomplished this, but I don’t think anyone took charge of maintaining knowledge of, and access to, these programs after I graduated. That was before digital archives existed, but it’s still the case they require people to look after these records so they are not simply forgotten.
The last I heard, that emeritus professor turned 100 three years ago, and as far as I know he is still kicking. Maybe he still bugs people to keep his programs available?
Fortran for all its archaism seems to have been a particularly durable programming language. I remember while working on an appeal of regulatory oversight on a large merger 20 years ago, discovering that the opposing expert’s model was embodied by a Fortran program. Neither I, nor any of the other people working on the project knew Fortran, but I remembered (i) that one of the company’s senior economists had done his PhD in Astrophysics & (ii) that physicists tended to have a familiarity with Fortran. He was able to get it working, and to demonstrate a major flaw in the model.
I’d hate to try this with a more obscure programming language. Imagine trying to find somebody who knew Ada, for example, at short notice.
Is it that they were durable or that so many of them were created that chances were that at least some of them would survive?
