The IHT A crusade to save digital material March 18, 2010 | By PATRICIA COHEN Among the archival material from Salman Rushdie on display at Emory University, in Atlanta, are inked book covers, handwritten journals and four Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The 18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks. But like most Rushdian paradises, this digital idyll has its set of problems. As research libraries and archives are discovering, ''born-digital'' materials - those initially created in electronic form - are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated. Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits - 0's and 1's - written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0's and 1's simply don't exist anymore. Imagine having a record but no record player. All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible. Continua qui: http://tinyurl.com/y9hxmuc