by Lance Ulanoff
The U.S. government must help us preserve digital images and, in turn, our legacies.
We are at constant risk of losing our digital images. It's a subject that worries me, and one I've touched on before. This time, however, I have a new proposal: Let's create a national human image database. It wouldn't consist just of people, but of everything. Everyimage that humans capture digitally would be stored here.
Crazy idea, huh?
Maybe, but let's think about what's happening today. ….<section cut away, click thru for whole article>
Library of Congress
Apparently, the Library of Congress agrees with me. The world's largest library has created a relatively well-funded National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. Its goal is laudable: "to develop a national strategy to collect, archive and preserve the growing amounts of digital content . . . ." The problem is that it doesn't go far enough. While the LOC is working double time to preserve digital information produced in maps, movies, sound recordings, Web sites, and databases, it's mostly just trying to encourage consumers to save their digital images. I'd like the LOC to go further.
Imagine a national digital-image directory managed by the Library of Congress. Everyone could upload their images at full resolution, please. (Otherwise, how will historians zoom in to the really nitty details, like how many stars were on that general's uniform in that parade?) The photos could be organized by geo-location and family. Other family members could access them, but those who submit the images will understand that after a period of time (say, a decade), the images will become part of the master database. Folks could also option to make those photos part of the national database at the outset.
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Save Our Digital-Image History, Please - Columns by PC Magazine.
