Managing Digital Information: The Emerging Technologies.

• Author: ANDOLSEN, ALAN A.

Technology and information are inseparable aspects of the information environment. Technologies that will significantly affect the future of information and records managers are identified and discussed here. Some are already before us, though not widely known. Some are on the threshold; and some are noted in anticipation of what will come. Storage and retrieval technologies will require in-depth understanding from information and records managers to gain the best benefits, assure adequate digital records management, and avoid incompatibilities that result in orphaned information in obsolete systems.

On the threshold of the millennium, technology moves more quickly than organizations can comfortably react. New digital media emerge in ever-faster technology development cycles. The volume of digital data outstrips that in hard-copy records. Thanks to high-speed networks, information is in constant motion around the globe. Information managers struggle daily to understand the new technologies and their applications. They must race to stay ahead of the curve. The struggle will not get any easier.

Dramatic strides are now being made in the laboratory, strides that will further enhance our record keeping ability but that also will make our professional lives more complex. Three developments promise dramatic increases in computer storage capacity: holography, nano-CDs, and electronic paper/ink. To find the enormous amounts of information stored on these new media, structure-based mark-up languages, new eigenvector search engines, and intelligent agents are tools that may offer new modes of effective information retrieval.

Information managers need to understand both the storage and the retrieval technologies in order to gain maximum benefits, assure adequate digital information management, and avoid incompatibilities that result in orphaned information in obsolete systems.

Holography

We know holograms as familiar anti-counterfeit devices on our credit cards and now on paper currency around the world. But they are much more than that. Holograms are devices that store data through the interaction of light waves on special materials. Because holographic images have three dimensions, information can be stored in layers inside a hologram. Magnetic and optical disks store data serially -- that is, in sequence, one piece after another. Holographic storage can stack about 40 pages of information in the same small location within the hologram. The data is read by tilting the angle of the beam of light used to read it.

Although early holograms were created on photographic film, today's photopolymers and photo-refractive crystals provide greater storage possibilities. Chemically, a polymer is a long chain of several single molecules, or monomers. Plastics and Plexiglas[TM] are examples of polymers familiar to us from daily life. Polymers that have potential for holography have excellent recording properties (i.e., high light sensitivity, high resolution) even when very thick. Photopolymers are used in WORM devices; photo-refractive crystals are erasable.

Scientists are currently researching issues related to the angle, wavelength, and placement of images to increase storage capacity. Lasers are the most common light source both for recording and reading these holograms.

One example of a holographic storage system is IBM's HESS technology. At its current stage of development, the system can store more than a dozen times the capacity of current mainframe hard disks. It can read and write data 10 times faster than today's systems since many pages of information can be accessed simultaneously. Each page of holographic information can contain more than a million bits, and the system can store thousands of pages on a crystal no larger than a dime. With this capacity, a computer the size of a watch could hold gigabytes of information. But this is only the beginning. NTT of Japan has an experimental technology that can record 30 hours of video on a crystal the size of a fingernail -- a density of 10 trillion bits per square centimeter.

Even though current laboratory efforts have shown that holography can store massive amounts of information within the tiny crystals, until recently retrieval of the information has often meant destruction of the information on the media. The information in a holographic crystal is stored in regions of differing brightness and darkness created by two laser beams that have the same wavelength but differ in phase. (Holograms are created by beams of light with the same wavelength, whose starting points, however, are not the same. This out-of-synchronization [i.e., not in phase] is the condition that allows the holograms to be created.) Holographic crystals rearrange their electrons in response to these beams, thus creating a necessary interference pattern.

During the retrieval process, laser light of the same wavelength was used to illuminate the crystal and to recreate the original interference pattern. However, when the illumination once again excited the electrons, the act of retrieval destroyed the pattern. The latest approach uses specially treated crystals and a combination of laser and ultraviolet light to "brand" the information onto the holographic crystals. The combination of two light sources creates the interference pattern, but only one, the red laser, is required to retrieve the information.

Holographic crystals have a theoretical storage limit of 125 MB per cubic centimeter or about 1,000 times more storage than currently available on RAM chips. When this type of capacity is available to the ordinary user in five to 10 years, information managers will...