Our Digital Legacy...
From DC to Denver to Dhaka, We're All in "Alexandria"

Due to aging computer media, system incompatibility and poor or lost documentation, the world is losing, every year, the equivalent of many Great Libraries of Alexandria.

Thanks to our work with such institutions as the National Archives and IPUMS.org we have had the privilege of recovering and helping to preserve data here in the U.S, and also for organizations all over the world. It seems that our friends in developing nations have even greater challenges in many respects.

We've made presentations on this topic at a number of meetings and conferences. We hope you find this to be conveyed in a useful and entertaining way.

The Luxury of Languishing

Twelve thousand pages of New Amsterdam paper records sat largely un-noticed in an Albany vault for hundreds of years. To our great good fortune, a scholar trained in 17th century Dutch set to work on them in 1973, which ultimately led to Russell Shorto's wonderful book "Island at the Center of the World".

What's the point? Well, our older digital records don't have the luxury of languishing for long periods. Many of them are "evaporating" before our very eyes. (That vapor-trail makes for a bad sort of cloud computing. :-)  

Here's a link to the presentation...  "From DC to Denver to Dhaka: We're All in Alexandria"