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Feb. 25, 2007 The literally pervasive records, proliferating documents, of the expansive electronic era present the massive challenge of their preservation for the future generations of users, well beyond the mere 21st century. A major crisis now exists as to how best e-records can be maintained seemingly indefinitely. in the face of many technological difficulties. People place more and more demands upon records and their easier accessibility. Hardware and software, however, become more and more rapidly obsolete, yet, the variously contained information, in many cases, may be significantly needed for centuries to come; this is for the ever continuing requirements of government, business, and/or historical (archival) purposes. Future kinds of technologically engineered documents will simply have to come to exist, with speculation about what they will be like coming later in this article. This is while, of course, electronic records media of many types, sizes and varieties continues, of course, to grow all over the world by dominating government, industry and commerce. People need to recognize clearly, however, that at present a record is still a record, meaning that it could be, e.g., a piece of paper, a microform, an email, an electronic document, or a digital image of some kind, which ought to be perceived as a simple truism. Even the always future projection of the supposedly paperless office that will come into being everywhere is not the simultaneously proclaimed beginning of a recordless office. There exists the further rational consideration that a record's content ought, for now, to properly determine retention, not the mere media that simply contains it as to its physical existence as such. Increasing amounts of Federal Government regulations and those of the states as well are, in addition, requiring growing numbers of companies and corporations to seriously retain more of that records content for ever greater periods of temporal time. Such time equates soon enough into money to satisfy such crescive demands upon important records retention matters, especially in legal terms of reference. While the predominance of content controls the advancement of professional records and information theory in this matter, in formal practice, the actual storage media and its physical software present the true and observed challenge, which will be noted extensively. As more digital tapes and optical discs, as examples in the real world of business, are accumulated daily in the storage centers of off-site archive providers, businesses know that they are increasingly expensive to maintain as usable units of electronic-based information as valid records, which can be ever made, e.g., subject to litigation. Long-term Storage Issues, Challenges, and Solutions For the most part, software that was created for the data usually has limited backward compatibility; this, therefore, means that the different versions of a computer program are not always able to read the stored data contained in earlier versions. As an additional problem, the exact media on which the data is stored tends to generally degrade relatively rapidly over time. Expecting electronic records media to functionally last much longer than about 10 years is stretching such media to its practical limits of practical usability regarding assumed media permanence. Under such empirical. factual, circumstances, e-records professionals state that long-term archiving is the actually the same as the use of repeated steps favoring what is called data migration from one medium and application to another done during the datašs entire life span. The computer storage industry, fortunately, is already working on the known problems and doing it, moreover, from various angles of active attack. Among other efforts, an attempted answer to the aforementioned backward-compatibility challenge thus acknowledged is to successfully convert the records data to existing and common plain-text formats; these include ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) or Unicode; these support all characters across all computer platforms, languages, and programs. The utilization of such plain-text formats to store data allows for virtually any software to read the files; however, it can induce the loss of data structure as well as decay of rich features inclusive of graphics. Use of PDF (Portable Document Format) files as another practical means to store long-term data has been very popular. There can be, nevertheless, certain remaining backward-compatibility problems even with PDFs. The file formatšs developer Adobe Systems Inc. has, it should be stated, created an archival version of its software that is called PDF-A that seems to basically answer this back-compatibility issue satisfactorily. So far, according to much informed opinion, the most promising of the standard data-storage technologies are now coming forth within the relatively new XML- (eXtensible Markup Language) based formats. Fortunately, XML is both a file format and self-describing markup language functionally made to be fully independent of both particular hardware and operating systems, which is, at the least, an enormous advance for all computerized records. By reading up on the specific subject concerning computer media, one can find out that the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is actively trying to appropriately solve what it calls the "100-year archive dilemma." This is planned to be done by pursuing a true standards effort for modern electronic media. The realistic goal is to properly store data in a suitable format forever made readable by a projected generic reader of some kind. In the professional understanding of the SNIA, media degradation is not to be looked at as being the real issue to handled as to the chief difficulty involving e-records. The actual challenge, in fact, is the needed creation of long-term readers and associated compatibility that is going to be dealt with effectively. Rational attempts are also being made, by some businesses, in their trying to somehow postpone the long-term archival problem by successfully maintaining collations of disk arrays; this is for retaining data online and keeping it fully accessible as well. Some organizations, moreover, are considering the interesting use of a growing class of inexpensive disk arrays as the preferred storage medium for data retention and its added readability. This logical option is considered valuable because a tape or optical media kept in a vault can, in fact, degrade over time. The new disk arrays, disk libraries as they are sometimes known, are normally centered upon relatively inexpensive ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) disks; these disks (a computer disk drive interface) had been typically utilized, in the past, solely in PCs. This is, of course, merely a kind of temporary solution or simple holding action at best. Migration of records media will, therefore, be vitally needed for the great majority of either disk or tape situations, when thinking about truly long-term storage; this is normally regarding today's disk interfaces, in particular, as a most useful and pertinent example of what is directly meant. Many IT experts agree that the requirement to centralize data backup for standardizing the method of storage is today the most essential component, of any really archival system, thought to be a truly permanent type of solution for computerized records systems. In a possible scenario, for instance, there may be the plausible case of WAN (Wide Area Network) transmitted documents sent to a central data center; information about the document's creator, document type, creation location, origination time, and reason for its creation could be logically captured and stored in a SQL (Structured Query Language) database. With such a system in place, therefore, a record type search can be made without having to formally possess intricate knowledge about that document many year after it was actually created; this would be, of course, a very positive result of such applied technology for much effective records work. Possibilities for trying to logically achieve many of the aforementioned and hoped for results might be made achievable, for instance, by utilizing such tools as Microsoft's Office 12 and its new XML-based file format as a necessarily standard format for many future archiving purposes. This would be for the noted, future-oriented attempt, through, e.g., a presently conceived best practices effort, at creatively developing a true standard archiving format ,in a genuinely universal sense of expected acceptance and cognate utilization, within the first decade of this century. Future Records Speculations: Intelligent Records and Robotic Phords The electronic media of the future will see information transmitted on mere beams of light without necessarily having a physical substance related to the resultant lightwave existing records. Thus, in addition, the advanced optical computer will be aided by the forces of nanotechnology applied with progressive knowledge engineering principles to computing needs. Such future records media will have the integral power to fully assemble and reassemble themselves into various configurations at the whim of either the sender or receiver of the data unit stream(s). They will, in effect, be manifestly protean and creative types of photonic-engineered products with increasingly built-in aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) comparably similar to the highest capabilities of the most advanced computers that may come to exist and be, in effective, fairly indistinguishable from the computers themselves. Classification systems as to records taxonomies will be dependent upon the equivalent of various beam of light (or other such photonic related sources) that will seemingly have no discernible beginning or end to their self-perpetuating existence. Today's concepts and categories of what records consist of will, moreover, have to change rapidly to better affect this rapidly moving era's knowledge creation's ever crescive demands and newer realities. The most advanced category of future media products will tend to incorporate what can be called the Intelligent Record (IR) that will remain on the forever cutting edge of progressive information technology combined with many nanorobotic characteristics. The IR vehicle will, therefore, logically encompass the superbly photonic-engineered AI products that will, in turn, make today's latest and greatest electronic records medium seem extremely primitive, limited, clumsy, dull, and highly antiquated in comparison. A dynamic leap of informational-knowledge technology will push forth needed technic developments toward unprecedented degrees of prolific photonic records, which might be called "phords", having the capacity to transform themselves from text to graphics to audio to video and any possible combination thereof; this will be the case where a single phord will carry within itself developmental and transactional properties of any kind of conceivable and yet-to-be-conceived-of record(s) combination(s). As a beam of light occurring as rapidly as the speed of light itself, the phords will come to surpass previously existing records media by being, e.g., self-indexing entities that will conveniently also provide their own abstracts, classifications, histories, needs, etc., as may be desired increasingly by both their human and computerized users. People of the later 21st century will be amazed at how earlier societies were able to put up with non-IRs without going crazy by the static nature of unintelligent records that were light years behind the highly usable phords and robotic phords The documentary "primitivism" that exists today will come to be perceived as a kind of cultural scandal, if not a kind of outright stupidity, in that technological resources were not earlier much better directed toward recording more human achievement in the purported Information Age. This is while hundreds of billions of dollars are yearly spent on armaments instead because of cognate moral primitivism. IRs will be able to easily handle certain specialized mathematical calculations based upon a projected and new, three-dimensional form of mathematics that can be called cubistics analysis; it would be used for doing highly specialized calculations pertaining to measuring activities, e. g., within molecules, subatomic particles, and other such matters requiring three-dimensional evaluations of spatial relationships and interrelations; such calculations would be conducted, therefore, within mathematical configurations precisely related to this unique kind of geometricized algebra, meaning, thus, the aforementioned cubistics analysis. Consideration of Metadata A small part of the capacities to be expected automatically of IRs and phords can be so perfectly illustrated by a good discussion of the nature of metadata, which is often simply described as data about data and that is literally true as a factual statement logically put. The data of metadata describes the context, content, and structure of e-documents, which is, in fact, in addition to information about the records and their associated management over the course of time. And, this chronological factor is very essential to understanding metadata. There may be raised the logical question as to what it actually does. Metadata allows for the creation, registration, classification, access, preservation, and disposition of e-records over time as well as within and across domains. Metadata, moreover, can be utilized to identify, authenticate, and contextualize e-records. The people, processes, and systems that make, manage, maintain, and actually use them and the policies that rule them are encompassed by the metadata. Currently, it is the case that some metadata can be entered manually while other metadata is fully capable of being captured automatically. Upon the creation or capture of records, metadata then describes the record's context, business-related context, and associated agents integrally involved. Metadata, it should be noted, is also joined to describe the record's specific structure for its availability for use over time. A record's structure, therefore, includes both its physical or logical structure and the cognate technical attributes thereof properly attendant to the very metadata itself. There are, however, actually two main types of metadata that one ought to be better aware of for needed understanding. That which is known as "process metadata" continues to functionally accumulate information during the e-record's particular existence. It documents activities that occur associated with the e-record after its first capture or entrance into the records and information management system. Such metadata, e.g., defines changes in the logical or physical structure of the record and, furthermore, documents new relationships connected to other records or even any related aggregations. Both record and process metadata form, it can be added, an e-record required to be managed for the entire existence or life of the original e-record concerned. Another important aspect of metadata relates significantly to records management metadata. Since such metadata could be attached to a record by another system for another purpose. When perceived or seen in this much larger context, handlers of metadata should ensure that appropriate links and relationships are knowledgeably established and that metadata should not be duplicated nor unnecessarily created as such. Metadata can be, additionally, utilized for matters pertaining to e-business transactions, preservation issues, rights management considerations, resource discovery, and resource description. Metadata, furthermore, can be manipulated for describing an object to determine, when needed, its location. It can, moreover, vitally assist in organizing electronic records, facilitate improved interoperability across systems, give digital identification, and aid both records archiving and preservation activities or functions. Metadata is, therefore, one major means or tool for being able to answer the challenge of the life cycle of records, as to ensuring their future survivability and cognate accessibility, as well as pointing toward the very hopeful development of Intelligent Records and robotic phords. Conclusion Ways of handling the massively produced e-records of the past and present do and will come to increasingly exist as e-technology progresses, of course. These ways, as was described above, will include plain-text formats, disk arrays, XML formats, PDA-As, and other choices depending upon the business needs that will be addressed; this is besides the utilization of media migration as a truly requisite method to avoid e-media obsolescence and assisted by informational tools such as metadata. But, all the currently known means for preserving records in a usable electronic format are merely transitional measures to deal with the past realities, as the present instance rapidly becomes the recent past; this is, moreover, while computer generations often span several such e-generations merely per calendar year. The IRs and robotic phords of the future information revolution, allied properly to much of nanotechnology, will creatively lead the way toward helping to define a brilliant direction toward means of having preservable records; these will be, in addition, fully capable of appropriately incorporating increasing degrees of AI to aid in their own preservation skills and abilities as "intelligent" entities in the service of communication, society, culture, mankind, and advanced civilization in general ------------ About the author: Joseph Andrew Settanni, CRM, CPC is a Certified Records Manager and Certified Professional Consultant with 30 years of professional experiencein data, archives, records and information management. Email: mkeegan311@earthlink.net Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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