Quote:
Originally Posted by onwebcam
Yeah it's something they normally do. They had 150 years of data but once they came up with a way to manipulate the data to suit their needs they destroy the actual hard copy data and apparently (even though they are scientists) didn't think of make digital copies of the hard copies. Give me a damn break. I'm sure the shredders and admins have been getting in plenty of overtime lately many places.
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Actually, tossing out old raw data is something that is indeed often done. Even today.
You see, research departments in universities tend to be underfunded, and data storage costs a fair amount of money. So in many cases, departments are faced with the choice to either spend the money on things like data storage, or to use that money for a few grad or postgrad spots.
Back when I was studying philosophy I was in the faculty council. At one point, one of our professors got a research grant of about a hundred thousand dollars. That was HUGE - it opened up several postgrad spots for the department.
Later on, the department was moved into another building. Since the new building had less library space, lots of old books and journals were tossed out. There simply wasn't any room for them, and there was no money to store them.
Right now I'm in med school, which is positively flush with money compared to most other university departments. Yet the project I'm (very slightly) involved in at the moment already had one researcher work without pay for over a month - he had exceeded his budget, so there simply wasn't any money left. Now, if they had a bit of spare money, where do you think it would go... data storage or another postgrad position or two?
The fact of the matter is that most research is done for pennies on the dollar. In an ideal world, no data would ever get dumped. But this isn't an ideal world, so researchers often dump data they believe aren't needed anymore simply because saving it all would be too expensive.