What Will Be Today’s Written Record?

A story in the Washington Post chronicles the efforts to recreate Thomas Jefferson’s library for display at the Library of Congress. Jefferson’s library was vast and extensive enough that it includes, the article says, books and pamphlets on everything from beekeeping to philosophy. The third president’s goal was as ambitious as Google: to “amass the whole of human knowledge.”

Jefferson built his collection through his life and then sold the 6,487 tomes to the United States for $24,000 in 1815. Two thirds of those were burned in an Easter morning fire in 1851. And a long effort has culminated in all but about 300 of the volumes being restored to the Jefferson collection more or less in their original form, although many aren’t the actual books Jefferson owned.

That’s quite an effort, one certainly to be lauded. But it got me to wondering whether, 200 years from now, someone would be able to “bring back” today’s content. Everything I have written in the last ten years, for instance, is easily available to me. Not counting writing that has been published elsewhere on the Internet, it is stored on my hard drive. But that’s where it all resides. The only way to access it is through a computer program on my computer.

How long will the program that created most of these files, Microsoft Word, still be able to read them after my computer becomes obsolete? With the rapid changes in technology, will we have all these hard drives around, but nothing to read them with? Many of Jefferson’s books, all these years later, are still around. Will the same thing happen with electronic content? How do you archive front pages of newspapers that change all day as the story is updated, for instance?

I still think that books are the one printed medium that will survive the changes the Internet has brought to newspapers and magazines. Unless we destroy ourselves first, they'll be around in centuries to come. But what’s going to happen to content published on the Internet? Is digital content too ephemeral to last?