The Digital Black Hole
Libraries around the world still hold copies of books printed hundreds of years ago. Will e-books still be read by us in hundreds of years' time? Librarians are1the fact that digital information and digital books are disappearing. Technology is always changing, and even now, we cannot get information typed in programs we used ten or fifteen years ago. Is digital data in danger of disappearing into a digital black hole?
Amazingly, we still have copies of the first collection of William Shakespeare's 36 plays (威廉·莎士比亚的36部戏剧), The First Folio. That's not bad for a book that's nearly 500 years old. The Folio was2in 1623. Around 800 copies were printed and 234 known copies still survive today.
Books are easy to store and we don't use any special equipment to read them. But what about the documents (文件) kept on your computer now? Will people be able to read them in 800,500 or even 10 years' time? Documents we stored on discs (磁盘) ten or twenty years ago can't be3on our 21st century laptops. What about all your digital photograph? Every second, thousands of them are uploaded to social media. What will happen to them? Will they be lost in a few years' time?
Music is in danger of being lost, too, we have to think of new ways to store it. We must copy this music or find the best way of storing it for future generations.
When a website closes down, all the information on it is deleted. It's gone4. It was disappeared into the ‘digital black hole' Organizations have understood this problem. In 2004, the British Library started to keep important websites for future generations, just like paper-based literature. In the event of a digital black hole, it could all disappear. The only5is to print it all out and keep physical copies.
With all the amazing new digital technology available to us today, we still have to rely on the centuries-old technology of printing. For now, printed copies are still the6way to store information.
