Re: CHAT: facing your own mortality (as a conlanger)

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 12:23 AM,  <li_sasxsek@...> wrote:

> Paper doesn't last long either, especially modern paper.  I have
> 20 year old books and newspapers where already turning yellow
> and rotting away into dust.
Acidic paper, such as most mass-market paperbacks
were printed on for most of the last 80-odd years,
decays pretty quickly; but higher-quality acid-free
paper can last hundreds of years.

> At least optical media like CD's
> will keep for a long time if you avoid scratching them, and I
> can make backups in case one becomes unreadable.  In the
CDs will *maybe* last longer than the average
acid paper book, but I wouldn't count on it.  And the
possibility of backing up/recopying periodically
depends on someone actively taking an interest
in the material stored on said optical media at
regular intervals.  If we take the case of some
storage medium neglected and ignored for
decades and then rediscovered, an acid paperback
has a better chance of still being readable than a
CD, and a non-acidic hardback has a far better
chance than either.

The Long Now foundation is, among other things,
working on more durable storage media, and
educating people about the ephemerality of
our current most popular media.  They sponsor
the Rosetta Project, too, that's supposed to preserve
long-term information about thousands of languages.

http://www.longnow.org

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article