Time to preserve digital memories, family history and more

That digital photo you just took at a family wedding was fast and easy and can be downloaded and forwarded just as quick.

And that e-mail you received from your son or daughter serving overseas also can make the rounds to family and friends.

But will that photo or document be there decades from now? Could they even be handed down to future generations?

Certainly not in its current form. That means you could lose your family history unless you take some important steps now.

That's exactly what national libraries, research centers, universities and governments worldwide are facing as well. They've discovered the awful truth about that fabulously cool digital technology. It has a shorter life span than old-fashioned paper.

Digital images, video, audio and documents all face obsolescence faster as technology changes, or it degrades when copied to other mediums. Software and hardware companies also may no longer support the system where your work is stored. So if the system crashes, good luck. And it could require more money to keep it upgraded, accessible and safe, experts said.

The biggest challenge is the lack of long-term management for digital work and tracking it to make sure it doesn't disappear, said Robert J. Mercer, president of Des Plaines-based ExLibris, a 20-year-old software company that caters to the world's libraries.

"When paper yellows and turns brittle, you can handle that with restoration measures," said Mercer. "But in the digital world, if you can't see it, it's gone. There's no time to sort it out or save it. It goes from working to not working very quickly."

National libraries, academic and research libraries are on the front lines of preserving all of our history, art, scientific and academic research. They are facing the fact that more original material is being created digitally every day.

"It's been a huge challenge," said Martha Anderson, program management director for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

"More and more, we realize that we need to be discerning on what we save for the public."

The national preservation program was created by legislation in 2000 to begin a national effort to develop strategies to preserve digital materials.

"Scientific data and everything else has become digital and we risk all of it being lost without a core regime around it."

The national program has developed about 130 relationships with libraries and others worldwide, and aims to help set standards and to educate people on the need to preserve digital materials.

"There is even a teen project built around the Internet and involving high school classes," said Anderson. "We asked students to look at the Web and if they could build a time capsule to show what the world is like today, what Web sites would they save. What would it say about their time here?"

The Illinois State Library in Springfield also has staff working on saving digital images, documents and publications produced by different state offices and agencies, said Connie Frankenfeld, the state library's electronic depository initiative chief.

"The long-term problem, of course, is what do we have to do before we can't read it any more," she said. "You need to migrate it to the next form, and we do not get rid of the original."

That includes documents that were in the once-famous Word Perfect or Lotus Notes 1-2-3 and were upgraded to Word. But one day that, too, will change.

"It hasn't been a big problem yet, but it will be down the road because of advancing technology and sooner or later companies will stop supporting their applications."

There's also a big difference between storing and preserving digital material. Storing just keeps the material in one spot. The preservation process also includes keeping track of how that material was created, the forms it was stored under, dates, and other explanations to tell the caretaker what it is, how it can be accessed and what can be done with it in the future.

"Just take the Apollo 11 landing," said Mercer. "There were lots of images that were transmitted back to earth. They were great images, but a lot of those are gone now. All bits and bytes are not common."

ExLibris has developed a preservation software system, which is now being used at the New Zealand national library, Mercer said.

As the digital preservationists of the world watch how this new software works, they will continue to work on standards to keep society's most important images and documents ready for future generations.

For the rest of us, that could mean transferring that TIF photo to a JPG image or other medium. If it's a family photo of a wedding or long-lost relatives, you should print it on archival paper, which is often done at photography studios or even drug stores.

"You just can't print it, save it or back it up," Mercer said. "You have to preserve it, too."