New job categories: Digital Archaeologist and Digital Historian. To the best of my knowledge, these careers don’t yet exist, but it’s high time they did. What we have so far…

Digital Archivist and Digital Curator
These jobs exist in a variety of fields, from managing medical X-ray records to managing digital photographs and data in a museum.

Computer Museums
There are currently various museums and private collections of computers, network equipment, and software. I doubt anyone is making a deliberate and methodical effort to catalog and document these collections on a global scale.

Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine
I just learned today that the Internet Archive, host of the Wayback Machine, (archive(dot)org) is IPv4 only. I don’t know what plans might be in the works to upgrade to IPv6, but today this represents an existential threat to one of the largest collections of historical web pages on the planet.

Old data formats are being lost. Several years ago, Scientific American published an article comparing deciphering old digital data to reading clay tablets. Even if the data is preserved – say, on a CD-ROM – it may be in a proprietary format that can only be read by a particular version of antiquated software that ran on a 32-bit processor. Does the documentation still exist to decode that data? What if the company went out of business and the founder walked away?

In a thousand years, understanding our global societies will depend as much, or more, on the preservation and interpretation of digital information as on the remnants of our cookware, clothing, and tools.

That’s why it’s time to begin today to create the jobs of Digital Archaeologist and Digital Historian. The rate of change is so rapid that our recent past is already slipping through our fingers.