GENERATIONAL DATA INTERVIEWS

Last year, the Library Innovation Lab published Century-Scale Storage, a sprawling look into the current state of long term digital storage and preservation.

At our present moment, the question of how exactly we will store and protect human culture, history, and knowledge is in flux. Software, hardware, and network technologies are undergoing immense changes. All around the world, civic, educational, and journalistic institutions are facing high levels of skepticism and disruption. The challenge of enduring access to digital objects is no longer a new question, but a critical everyday reality. How should we be storing, formatting, curating, and organizing data? How can we ensure access that lasts for generations?

To broaden this discussion and capture a slice of this particular moment, we interviewed 14 scholars, archivists, designers, business leaders, and engineers about their pie in the sky ideas, their dreams, their fears, and the lessons they have drawn from their years of practice.

We started each conversation by asking a single question- "If you were given unlimited funding to design a system for storing and preserving digital information for at least a century, what would you do?"

The responses span art, design, storytelling, code, economics, jurisprudence, information science, political science, and engineering. They are a kaleidoscope of outlooks and insights, revealing and inspiring, showing how we might move forward, what we can build, and what it takes to preserve across lifetimes.