The exhibit “Nebraska’s Citizen Soldiers in the 21st Century” demonstrates the power of electronic media. Through audio and video footage, the display at the Museum of Nebraska History brings to life such events as a car bombing in Iraq, mine disposal in Afghanistan and the Hurricane Katrina cleanup.

Visitors to the exhibit can hear National Guard troops’ voices  and read their e-mails from war and disaster fronts.

“It’s different from past exhibits because of the amount of electronic and digital information,” said exhibit curator Deb Arenz.

She was able to edit videos and audio tracks, sort and select photographs and edit e-mails all by using a screen and keyboard rather than pawing through paper documents, letters or printed photos.

“It was easier for me as a curator to go through all the stuff,” she said. “I was able to just view everything on my computer.”

But serious questions arise about whether historians of the future — say, 50 to 100 years from now — would be able to make use of the same resources in re-creating the history of the early 21st century. 

Historians, archivists, librarians and museum staffers all worry about whether today’s electronic records will still exist for future historians to explore. And if they do exist, will they be usable given the technological advances in the next century and beyond?

Everybody who works with historic records has concerns about the future, said Andrea Faling, state archivist with the Nebraska State Historical Society.

How to preserve digital records and to be sure they’re still usable decades from now, she said, is “something that we’re all grappling with right now.”

Personal records such as letters and diaries have always been important sources of historical data, especially to historians of culture and daily life, she explained. The diaries and letters of homesteaders, for example, have been invaluable to researchers studying life in pioneer days.

In the 21st century, however, instead of pen-and-paper diaries or handwritten letters, people communicate via computer blogs, e-mails or even abbreviated text messages.

Electronic messaging is fast, fashionable and fun, but archivists like Faling have concerns about whether those messages are being saved, and if they are saved whether the communications devices of the future will be able to decipher them.

“My concern is that there isn’t as much being saved,” Faling said.  People tend to delete e-mails after a while, or dump whole files to free up computer space. “We won’t have the quantity to work from unless we make an effort to preserve these things.”

E-mails pose a huge problem, said Lloyd Ambrosius, professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“They’re electronically based, not paper-based, and they may end up in files that aren’t readable in the future.”

When historians get together at national conferences, he said, this is often one of the major discussion topics. How the digital age will affect research is a big issue, “especially for people working in the current era — modern history.”

There’s always been a problem of historical records being lost, he noted. Many written or printed documents from the early 20th century have disintegrated, because they were on high-acid paper.

People have always burned letters they didn’t want future historians to see — for example, Willa Cather destroyed story drafts, letters and papers, and in her will she forbade scholars to quote from those that remained.

But e-mails, blogs and other electronic records are very easy to create and equally easy to eliminate, Ambrosius pointed out.

A federal law requires that official White House documents be preserved, and that applies to e-mails the same as to paper, he said.  But in the investigation of the Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame Wilson controversy, it became clear that  White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove used a Republican Party e-mail system instead of the official one, so those e-mails weren’t subject to the law.

Ambrosius said he doesn’t have too many problems himself because his major area of research is Woodrow Wilson, who was president from 1913 to 1921. Most of Wilson’s  letters and papers have been published and are available in the Library of Congress and other research centers. “I’m lucky to be working in the early 20th century,” he said.

When it comes to private individuals who are not government officials, it’s even more difficult to be sure records are kept. It would be difficult to have a law requiring someone like Donald Trump to preserve his personal correspondence for posterity, Ambrosius said. “Also, if George and Laura (Bush) exchanged love letters, there’s nothing that would require them to make those public” because they wouldn’t be official documents.

The possibility of visual and audio recordings becoming lost may be even greater than for written records because of rapid changes in technology.

The forms in which still and moving pictures, voices and texts are recorded are continually changing, said Paul Eisloeffel, the state historical society’s curator for visual and audio collections.

At one time, he said, moving images were preserved on celluloid film. Then came videotapes, and now the method of choice is digital images stored in computers  or on DVDs. Future technology will create new forms.

But as methods have advanced, the means of viewing the images have become more complicated, he said. Being able to use such stored images will require the correct hardware — computer, DVD player or whatever — combined with the proper software to decipher the digital data and turn it into an image.

One very real issue is degradation of the physical medium. Optical tapes, computer hard drives, CDs and DVDs all have a finite shelf life. For example, an ordinary CD or DVD begins to degrade after three years, because of oxidation.

People think of bits of information as existing in a sort of nonmaterial world called cyberspace, but that’s not really true, Eisloeffel said.  “They have to exist (physically) somewhere — on a tape, disc or server” — and wherever that is, concerns about preservation exist.

The other issue is whether the technology of the future will be able to make sense of digital data recorded today, he said.

“In 100 years, will we have machines that can read these ancient documents?” Eisloeffel wondered.

A current example might be the TV interviews broadcast immediately after the killings last month at the Von Maur store in Omaha. Will historians in 2108 studying  early 21st-century violence be able to view those videos? Maybe not.

When methods of recording data were simpler, there was less danger of the data being lost, he said. A movie on celluloid, for example, has obvious visual images, and even if there were no machine to project those images, it could be reinvented. With digital data, however, if the original computer program no longer exists, it might be impossible for future researchers to resurrect it using the technology of their time.

In the early days of the video era, Eisloeffel pointed out, some people re-recorded their home movies onto videotape and destroyed the original films. “But then the video went bad and they had nothing,” he said. “If they had kept the film and stored it properly, it would have long outlasted the tape.”

Up until the 1980s most local television news programs were stored on film, but then for economic reasons stations switched to storing them on videotape. Because the tapes were reusable, however, they got recorded over, and the original programs were lost.

Historians of the future might bemoan the scarcity of moving-picture images from the late 20th and early 21st centuries because they haven’t been preserved, Eisloeffel said. “There’s going to be a ‘dark age’ for historians from about 1980 on.”

That problem was the focus of a 2006 article in Popular Mechanics magazine titled “The Digital Ice Age” by Brad Reagan.

“The threat of lost or corrupted data faces anyone who relies on digital media to store documents — and these days, that’s practically everyone,” Reagan wrote.

He described how the USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier, had put all its operational system diagrams into  digital files. Then when technicians tried to read the files, they found that subtle errors had crept in due to file degradation.

“Digital information is so simple to create and store, we naturally think it will be easily and accurately preserved for the future,” Reagan wrote. “Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, our digital information — everything from photos of loved ones to diagrams of Navy ships — is at risk of degrading, becoming unreadable or disappearing altogether.”

In 1986 the British Broadcasting Corporation compiled a modern, interactive version of William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, a survey of life in medieval England.  It was stored on laser discs, which were considered indestructible at the time. But 15 years later the information was unusable — not because the discs had corrupted but because they were no longer compatible with modern computer systems.

“Software applications are updated on average every 18 months to two years, according to the Software and Information Industry Association, and newer versions are not always backward-compatible with the previous ones,” Reagan wrote. “This could be a problem on the USS Nimitz, just as it could make trouble for you if the file in question held your medical records.”

The best advice, he said, is to make many copies of items that you want to save in different forms and store them in different places.

That’s the philosophy behind LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), a system designed for libraries and archives to keep their collections accessible. To learn more about it, visit www.lockss.org.

Eisloeffel noted that most oral histories — firsthand recordings of people telling about their lives — are being stored on discs or computers. “The format of choice is digital,” because of ease of recording, sound quality and other considerations, he said. “It’s a matter of making lots of copies, to be sure things are saved properly.”

A sidebar to Reagan’s article noted that there are now archival-quality CDs and DVDs with a layer of 24-karat gold to prevent oxidation. They’re designed to last 300 years, but he cautioned: “Still, it’s prudent to check your storage media every few years for data corruption and to ensure that they’re still compatible with modern computers.”

He concluded:

“If history is a guide — and after all, that is the point of preserving history — we know the future will offer the means to manipulate digital information in ways we cannot yet imagine. The trick is to keep moving forward without leaving too much behind.”

Reach Bob Reeves at 473-7212 or breeves@journalstar.com.