Information preservation methods and strategies

Preserving Information

"T.M.I." is a common texting phrase which is meant to indicate "too much information;" and while there may be such a thing when it comes to people's personal information, there is no such thing as "too much information" when it comes to public records, literature, and other information. Take the Roman Empire for example, while historians have a great deal of information taken from records, literature, histories, etc., what remains today is only a fraction of what was produced at that time. It is very difficult to get a real understanding of the culture, history, society, legal system of Rome, or any other historical civilization without having an abundance of information about that society. And by preserving, documenting, and archiving information, modern society can preserve itself in a way that will allow future societies to understand it better.

In the past there has always been the problem of how exactly to best preserve information, as rolls, books, and other forms of documentation always seemed to decay. While some civilizations carved their information on stone tablets or walls, these were heavy and difficult to transfer the information. However, the modern world has invented a new way to store, catalogue, and retrieve information: the computer. This machine is specifically designed to store information in a way that will not decay, rot, burn, or be subject to other types of accidents; it is designed to store bits of information as positive and negative ions. And since the information is stored as charged particles, there is virtually an unlimited amount of information that can be stored in a miniscule medium like a memory drive, CD, or even a finger drive.

Because of the invention of information technology (IT) like the computer, large amounts of information can not only be stored for an infinite amount of time on a physically small device, but that information can be catalogued, searched, isolated, and displayed for the user. Search engines can sift through copious amounts of information, which would have taken days or weeks in the past using only books, in just a few seconds. While computers allow modern society to compile more data than ever before, they also allow people to use that information in a meaningful way.