text: Archaeologists of the future may struggle to interpret the 21st century civilisation due to missing written records if our digital trace is erased, Internet godfather has warned. 
   
   Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science taking place in San Jose, California, Vint Cerf, one of the men credited with the invention of Internet and a current Vice President of Google, warned relying solely on digital data storage to keep books, texts and photographs may be short-sighted. 
   
   "If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create?,” Cerf said. 
   
   "We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it. 
   
   Comparing the future knowledge about the 21st century to the post-Roman period in Western Europe of which relatively little is known due to the lack of written records, Cerf said the future generations may as well ‘wonder about us’ while having great difficulty to understand due to the uninterpretable bits of information we leave behind. 
   
   "In our zeal to get excited about digitising we digitise photographs thinking it's going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong," he said. "I would say if there are photos you are really concerned about create a physical instance of them. Print them out." 
   
   Referring to a book by American Pulitzer winning writer Doris Kearns Goodwin who reconstructed conversations between Abraham Lincoln and his friends through the analysis of his correspondence, Cerf said future historians may struggle to do the same for current luminaries due to the either missing or unreadable digital record. 
   
   "Let us imagine that there's a 22nd-century Doris Kearns Goodwin and she decides to write about the beginning of the 21st century and seeks to reproduce the conversations of the time,” he said. “She discovers that there's an awful lot of digital content that either has evaporated because nobody saved it, or its around but it's not interpretable because it was created by software that's 100 years old." 
   
   The problem may become even more serious when it comes to storing legal documents. 
   
   "We're going to have to build into our thinking the concept of preservation writ large," Cerf added. 
   
   One possible solution was what he called "digital vellum", a concept now being explored by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. 
   
   This involved taking a digital "snapshot" at the time an item is stored of all the processes needed to reproduce it at a later date, including the software and operating system. 
   
   The snapshot could then be used to reproduce the game, picture file or spread sheet, on a "modern" computer, perhaps centuries from now. 
   
   "Some people make the argument that the important stuff will be copied and put into new media and so why should we worry," said Cerf. "But ... historians will tell you that sometimes documents and transactions images and so on may turn out to have an importance which is not understood for hundreds of years. So failure to preserve them will cause us to lose our perspective." ||||| America 
   
   Internet Pioneer Warns Our Era Could Become The 'Digital Dark Ages' 
   
   i itoggle caption Andre Penner/AP Andre Penner/AP 
   
   What happens when today's high-tech data storage systems become tomorrow's floppy discs? 
   
   Google Vice President Vint Cerf is concerned about the answer and its implications for preserving history. Speaking at an annual conference of top American scientists, Cerf described such a loss of important information as a possible "digital Dark Ages." 
   
   Engineering and Technology Magazine reports that Cerf, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, says that by using digital storage for all of our books, documents and photos, we could be setting up a big problem for future historians who want to study the 21st century. 
   
   "If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create?," Cerf said. 
   
   "We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it," he said. 
   
   The conundrum isn't exactly new: in 2006, the U.S. Department of Energy threw $11 million at researchers from three universities and five national laboratories in hopes of finding a solution to "managing the torrent of data that will be produced by the coming generation of supercomputers." And, there are companies that offer services for converting data from outdated systems to something that's still usable today. 
   
   E&T; writes: 
   
   "Comparing the future knowledge about the 21st century to the post-Roman period in Western Europe of which relatively little is known due to the lack of written records, Cerf said the future generations may as well 'wonder about us' while having great difficulty to understand due to the interpretable bits of information we leave behind. "In our zeal to get excited about digitizing we digitize photographs thinking it's going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong," he said. "I would say if there are photos you are really concerned about create a physical instance of them. Print them out." 
   
   As an example, Cerf points to a book by author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. In Team of Rivals: The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln, Goodwin relied heavily on poring over the physical letters sent between Lincoln and his contemporaries. 
   
   As The Telegraph, quoting Cerf, notes: "Such a book might not be possible to write about the people living today ... — the digital content such as emails that an author might need will have 'evaporated because nobody saved it, or it's around but it's not interpretable because it was created by software that's 100 years old'." 
   
   Cerf calls the problem the "digital vellum" and says one solution might be to take a digital "snapshot" when an item is stored, recording all the elements needed to reproduce it at a later date. E&T; says:
target: – Think we've stored so much data that future historians will be swimming in the stuff? Not necessarily: A Google executive says the "digital Dark Ages" may be coming, when people will have little idea of how we think or live today, NPR reports. Google Vice President Vint Cerf expressed his concern last week at a conference of scientists in California: "If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create?" he says. "We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it." Cerf's worry is that future "modern computers" will have no way of reading content from today's software. Comparing future historians to Doris Kearns Goodwin—who relied quite a bit on letters of the period when writing Team of Rivals about Abraham Lincoln's cabinet—Cerf warns that today's email stash could vanish "because nobody saved it" or because it can't be read since it was created on century-old software, per the Independent. And he discards the notion that "important" stuff will be stored, saying that "sometimes documents and transactions images and so on may turn out to have an importance which is not understood for hundreds of years." His advice for us: Print those photos. For big data savers: Embrace the idea of "digital vellum," which involves snapping a pic of every way a file can be opened, and storing it with the original file, reports Engineering and Technology Magazine. "We're going to have to build into our thinking the concept of preservation writ large," says Cerf. (Unless of course the world ends up taken over by robots.)