【彭蒙惠英语】新闻剪辑（3/3）

NEWS worthy Clips(3/3)
Update your vocabulary with news clips from around the world

Experts trying to preserve world’s digital knowledge
If you’ve lost family photos, can’t listen to your old tapes or no longer can read important files stored on your pervious computer, you’re not alone.
An international group of experts have begun to tackle the problem. Most of the words, sounds or pictures that are created these days come in digital form, not printed on paper or film or carved in stone. Digital data can be accessed only by machines whose technology keeps changing and soon is outdated.
“It’s the grand challenge of the Information Age.” Said Francine Berman, co-chair of the Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access. Computer scientists, information experts, lawyers and economists will spend the next two years trying to devise a system to store data in a way that can be accessed in the future.
Most details remain to be worked out, but the digital information probably will be stored in a network of computer “repositories” scattered across the globe. To avoid obsolescence, the information will have to “migrate” repeatedly form existing systems to the next generation of storage platforms. Decisions have to be made about which data will be kept, who’ll have access to them, what it will cost and how to protect private information.
Examples of lost data abound.Early images of the Earth and the moon from space were stored on 1970s-era UNIVAC computers and can’t be recovered. Data stored on once-ubiquitous floppy disks are probably gone forever.
Berman has called the burning of the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, more than a thousand years ago, “one of the most devastating losses of knowledge in all of civilization.”
“Today, however, the digital information that drives our world and powers our economy is in many ways more susceptible to loss than the papyrus and parchment at Alexandra,” she said.

Vocabulary Focus
outdated (adj)--- no longer useful or modern
sustainable (adj)--- able to continue over a period of time
repository (n) a place where things are stored and can be found
ubiquitous (adj)--- seeming to be in all places

Specialized terms
Information Age (n phr)--- 资讯时代 the period beginning around 1970 and characterized by widespread electronic access to information through the use of computer technology
obsolescence (n)--- 过时 the process of becoming no longer useful or needed, having been replaced by something newer and better or more fashionable
papyrus (n)--- 莎草纸 paper produced by ancient Egyptians from a tall grass-like plant that grows in or near water, especially in North Africa
parchment (n)--- 羊皮纸 the thin dried skin of some animals which was used in the past for writing on, or a document written on this material