Re: preservation of negatives/slides/prints
Hi Camden. I gather that she kept all her negatives, slides, prints,
etc., in good shape and archivally stored. So I did pass along both
Gawain's and your comments about the digital scanning aspect. I
agree that with things changing so rapidly, that it might be a lot
more trouble and expense than it's worth to have a back-up system
like that.
Thanks for your input.
Diana
On Mar 19, 2007, at 1:19 PM, Camden Hardy wrote:
Diana,
In regards to the issue of to scan or not to scan, here's something
you may
want to consider.
The tricky thing about digital storage, as you alluded to, is that
standardized formats are constantly changing. It's only a matter
of time
until the CD/DVD is replaced by bigger and better things. If you
don't stay
on top of the new technologies and periodically migrate all of your
data to
the new media standard, there will be a point where you won't be
able to
access any of it. When the Zip drive faded into obscurity a few
years ago,
a professor in our English department contracted me to migrate all
of her
files from the last 7 years to CDs (took several days). Now that
the 3.5"
floppy drive is slowly being phased out by major computer
manufacturers like
Dell and Apple, everyone that's had data on floppy disks now has to
move it
all to a hard drive or CD/DVD.
With this in mind, I agree with Gawain. If you're not planning to do
anything with these images in the near future, it may not be worth
scanning
all of them right away. On the other hand, if the negatives are in
fairly
bad shape, you might want to scan them before the quality degrades
too much.
Camden Hardy
camden[at]hardyphotography[dot]net
http://www.hardyphotography.net
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