Visit any antiques store and you’ll encounter artifacts from the past: photographs, letters, a brochure detailing the Sinclair dinosaur exhibit from the 1964–65 World’s Fair, the ephemera of history. Yet these objects aren’t truly ephemeral, because they’re still here, decades, even centuries later. Why? Because they’re tangible.
Have you pondered the life cycle of intangible formats, digital information, given that those who produce these artifacts seldom make provision for their long-term preservation? For millennia, we’ve known what we’ve known due to artifacts that have survived, often despite their original creators’ neglect. The thing itself is the medium that delivers the information. At the time of creation, no attempts were made at intentional preservation, yet analog materials have a chance of surviving and serving as the historical record that biographers, historians,…
