I didn’t know much (or as much as I should have) about World War II until I watched Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's recent documentary, THE WAR. WWII was repeatedly given short shrift in my world history classes: by the time we got to the 20^th century, too little time was left in the school year to do it justice. I knew the big story lines and the significance of places like Guadalcanal and the beaches of Normandy , but I never really understood the enormity of the challenge and the physical geography that was affected until Ken Burns gave us the gift of his epic documentary.

To make this film, Burns and his team collected thousands of images and film sequences from hundreds of archives around the world, including a few personal archives. He describes the process in this video. “It's a digital world,” he says.

This fact—and the importance of finding a way to preserve our shared cultural history—hit home for me, in a very personal way, this past weekend.

This summer, I heard a presentation from Dave Price, head of Systems and e-Research Services the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The Bodleian Library has been around for some 400 years, and like many of the big old libraries on the planet, has as a primary mission the preservation of scholarly and other materials.

For much of the past 400 years, library and preservation technology or science hasn’t changed all that much. The first card catalog seems to have been invented at the Bodleian in 1674. Dewey invented his decimal system in 1876. The process of cataloging and preserving texts has been around for a while. But over the past 50 years, things started changing dramatically because of the sheer volume of content combined with multiple and competing recording technologies such as microfilm and microfiche. Today, most content is “born digital,” and everything that is not (like my stepdad's WWII photos) is being converted to digital formats.

It would be easy to assume that preserving digital content would be easier than the previous “analog” or paper versions. After all, paper starts decomposing after so many years. But bits (of data) rot as well. Disks and tape wear out and fail. Protocols and document formats change. Try opening a word processing document from 10 years ago, and you’ll see how big the problem will be in 400.

As a result, the management and preservation task facing organizations like the Bodleian Library, The Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque nationale de France is immense. These institutions must come to grips with the new challenge that digital content creates if this content is to survive and be readable by those in the next 400 years. That's why Sun and some of the greatest libraries on the planet have founded the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG). We hope to help these new “cybrarians” form a community to share best practices for preserving and archiving important research and cultural heritage materials and to help design new products and solutions.

I guarantee that our Sun engineers weren't thinking about the problem of preserving scholarly documents for the next 400 years when they invented some of the great hardware and software that they have. But regardless of whether it’s library documents, my stepdad’s pictures of WWII or medical images to help cure diseases, it’s great to a part of making—or at least preserving—history.