A sinking feeling over document migration BY William Matthews 03/17/2000 A new information technology crisis is looming, many times larger than the Year 2000 problem, technology expert Rich Lysakowski says. Its the problem of electronic document migration.

Millions of electronic documents are becoming unreadable as new hardware and software systems are developed and old ones are abandoned. To be saved, old documents must be migrated to formats that will be readable by tomorrows computer systems. But the task of migrating documents, and the cost of information lost from documents not migrated, will amount to "hundreds of trillions of dollars over the next 30 to 40 years," Lysakowski predicted.

Lysakowski has christened the looming migration problem "Titanic 2020" after the massive luxury liner that sank and the year he expects migration costs to become oppressive.

By comparison, the international effort to keep computers operating through the Year 2000 date change cost about $750 billion, said Lysakowski, who is executive director of the Collaborative Electronic Notebook System Association. The association is an organization of IT makers and users that promotes the development of advanced electronic recordkeeping systems.

The problem and cost could be minimized if IT users agreed on a common format for electronic documents. But so far, thats not happening, Lysakowski told an electronic documents conference Thursday. Software developers focus on the money they can earn by developing new programs quickly and often; they do not design formats designed to last the 20 or 50 or years that electronic documents must be kept, he said.

Many electronic records managers are counting on the new Internet language XML to become the common standard and eliminate the need for future document migrations. "XML is a shining star on the horizon," Lysakowski agreed. "But the problem with a star is it never touches the ground. Were always running toward the horizon."

http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/0313/web-4titanc-03-17-00.asp

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), March 18, 2000

Answers

This is an issue that has been well known for a long time, sometimes under the label: DEAD MEDIA. See: http://www.wps.com/dead-media/

-- Larry Victor (nuu@azstarnet.com), March 18, 2000.