Nostalgia and preservation

I saw this invitation to attend a presentation by the preservation librarian of the University of Illnois, my alma mater.

"While there is a growing nostalgia for our old mix tapes on compact cassettes, our legacy LP collections, and old family films, we are faced with growing challenges to actually be able to play many of these legacy audiovisual formats. But the preservation challenges of our personal legacy AV collections pale in comparison to the challenges we will soon face with the preservation of our growing digital photos and files, even though there is not yet a fond nostalgia for 3.5 inch floppy disks or thumb drives. Jennifer will present an overview of the typical AV and digital formats that many consider valuable to us and will present basic steps that people can take towards better preservation strategies to ensure that you will be able to continue access to these materials for years to come."

Yes, how to you play these formats if you've trashed the equipment?  I still have a reel to reel tape of our wedding, but the tape player is long gone. We've got old vhs tapes, and no player.  Soon the DVDs will probably be unusable. 

And yet, to ruin a career, someone with evil intent will do a deep dive into twitter or Facebook, and dredge up something sent out when he or she was 17, or hit the like button.