OPEN in 2024 - Important
SCENARIO: Its 15th January 2045, flying cars have FINALLY become commonplace and in a dusty corner of a UK library a local history book has been found "Our Fallen, a tribute to those 2,051 Lowestoft people who died because of two World Wars" It has 450 pages of information, text on each person and many photos. Some pages are damaged and difficult to read BUT at the end of the book, something unusual... Some sort of digital device presumably containing associated information from a previous century.
The purpose of this thought experiment is deadly serious. Can we PROMISE to future generations that important cultural information CAN be passed on intact.
The memory stick contains https://ourfallen.lowestoftoldandnow.org/ both in native format (inc copy of db), as a static html website and also as a txt and csv file. As part of our legacy commitment we have adapted the site to run well on WAYBACK platform, despite its lack of dynamic search. https://web.archive.org/web/20240112121533/https://ourfallen.lowestoftoldandnow.org/
Also 40 copies of hardback ISBN registered book have been printed and certain copies of the book (Regional Libraries and The British Library have been adapted to contain a USB memory stick.
CAN YOU HELP??
We are hoping Archivists and Drupal developers and others with technical expertise will ENGAGE with this scenario and could help us understand the UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS and how we turn this into a template that can be used by others eg
- Will the memory stick survive 20 years (or do we need to update every 10 years)
- Should we include ALL files (MySQL, Apache, PHP etc) as these versions will be well obsolete by then
- Maybe we even need to WRITE the technical spec of the way the data is stored/retrieved on the book page itself, to even allow the data to be read?
- Maybe the stick could have a working copy of the above systems
- What if devices no longer use browsers
- etc etc
