How to Preserve Digital Content

Winter: Digital content may become inaccessible over time, even if you've kept the bits somewhere. The medium could deteriorate or you couldn't find readers for it any more. To make things worse, overtime, the soft ware that might be needed to correctly render or interact with the visual objects may no longer run on operating systems and hardware of the day. So a hundred years from now, will you still be able to correctly interpret a p d t file? And i think we're going to have to start practising techniques to preserve digital content.

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This week, Stephanie Wong and Anthony Bushong introduce a special podcast of the Gtalk at Airbus speaker series where prestigious Googlers have been invited to talk with Airbus. In this episode, Vint Cerf, who is widely regarded as one of the fathers of the Internet, talks with Rhys Phillips of Airbus and fellow Googler Rafael Lami Dozo.

Vint tells us about his journey to Google, including his interest in science which stemmed from a chemistry set he received as a child. After high school, he got a job writing data analyzation software on the Apollo project. His graduate work at UCLA led him to the ARPANet project where he developed host protocols, and eventually to his work on the original Internet with Bob Kahn. Vint tells us about the security surrounding this project and the importance of internet security still today.

The open architecture of the internet then and now excites Vint because it allows new, interesting projects to contribute without barriers. Vint is also passionate about accessibility. At Google, he and his team continue to make systems more accessible by listening to clients and adapting software to make it usable. He sees an opportunity to train developers to optimize software to work with common accessibility tools like screen readers to ensure better usability.

Later, Vint tells us about the Interplanetary Internet, describing how this system is being built to provide fast, effective Internet to every part of the planet. Along with groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force, this new Internet is being deployed and tested now to ensure it works as expected. He talks about his work with NASA and other space agencies to grow the Interplanetary Internet.

Digital obsolescence is another type of accessibility that concerns Vint. Over time, the loads of data we store and their various storage devices could become unreadable. Software needed to use or see this media could no longer be supported as well, making the data inaccessible. Vint hopes we will begin practicing ways to perpetuate the existence of this data through copying and making software more backward compatible. He addresses the issues with this, including funding.

Vint Cerf

While at UCLA, Vint Cerf worked on ARPANet - the very beginnings of what we know as the internet today and is now, fittingly, Chief Internet Evangelist & VP at Google. He is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of “the fathers of the Internet”, sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn.

Rhys Phillips

Rhys Phillips is Change and Adoption Leader, Digital Workplace at Airbus.

Rafael Lami Dozo

Rafael Lami Dozo is Customer Success Manager, Google Cloud Workspace for Airbus.

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