The Rosetta Project is The Long Now Foundation's first exploration into very long-term archiving. It serves as a means to focus attention on the problem of digital obsolescence, and ways we might address that problem through creative archival storage methods. The first prototype of a very long-term archive is The Rosetta Disk - a three inch diameter nickel disk with nearly 14,000 pages of information microscopically etched onto its surface. Since each page is an image, rather than a digital encoding of 1's and 0's, it can be read by the human eye using 500 power optical magnification. The disk rests in a sphere made of stainless steel and glass which allows the disk exposure to the atmosphere, but protects it from casual impact and abrasion. With minimal care, it could easily last and be legible for thousands of years.
"The micro-etched Rosetta Disk has two sides. One side, meant to be a guide to the contents
of the disk, and is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight
major world languages (Arabic, English, Hindi, Indonesian, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish and
Swahili): "Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages
assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language
documentation." The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to microscopic
scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will
be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the
directions for using it—'get a magnifier and there is more.' Between the spiral text and the
globe graphic are columns of text that include an index listing the 1,500 languages that have
data on the reverse side of the disk. These are arranged alphabetically by geographic region.
On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of
language documentation. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about
equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages
are clearly visible with 100X magnification). The pages are arranged by geographic region,
country and alphabetically by language name. The bottom 20% of the disk is filled with lists
of vocabulary for the languages on the disk.
An easy way to show people the contents of the disk is to use the enclosed DVD, which
allows you to browse both sides of the disk, and zoom all the way down to view the microscopic content."
( Excerpt from: Care and Feeding of Your Rosetta Disk
by Laura Welcher Director of The Rosetta Project.)
