Science Friday's beautiful "File Not Found" series looks at the thorny questions of digital preservation: finding surviving copies of data, preserving the media it is recorded upon, finding working equipment to read that media, finding working software to decode the information once it's read, clearing the rights to archive it, and maintaining safe, long term archives -- all while being mindful of privacy and other equities. Read the rest

Hanan sez, "'A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits' by Claude Shannon can be viewed but cannot be printed. It's behind an MIT paywall. This thesis from 1937 predicted moderns digital circuitry. Why can't we print and read it at our convenience?"

Update: Lew Pitcher found a different copy, also on MIT's servers, that is an unencumbered PDF. Read the rest