Yes, in fact it is more important to know the limit to the life span of the
drives that can read it.
>>Once an image is in digital form it can be transferred to a new
>>storage medium with absolutely no loss . This is a quite
>>different situation with images on paper.
The lack of degradation is nice, but the problem here is SOMEONE has to do the
transfer. If the file gets put on the shelf and doesn't get transferred before
the technology leaves it behind, it is for all practical purposes completely
gone. At least with a good archival print the image is still there, even if it
has faded some in the last 100 years. I think that a museum may be able to keep
up with the data transfer, but the private collector has no guarantee that this
will continue after his/her death.
Also copying doesn't necessarily ensure the file is still readable. You also
need a program that can decode the file. These have to be copied to the new
medium as well, and must be able to run on the newer computers. You may also
want to convert the image file to a new format, and this process may not
actually be lossless.
>> Of course digital
>>images could be stored in digital form on paper if you really
>>wanted to ensure the degree of permanence provided by paper!
Interesting idea! You could conceivably document the image, provide a listing
of the program used to read the file, and give a listing of the image data. The
result would be a single book representing a single image. This would also be
something recognizable to your great grandchildren since the title would be
obvious. Perhaps optical character recognition systems will also be
sufficiently accurate in the future to make getting these data back into the
computer a reasonable task. You could even include an actual print just to give
the prospective reader of this document, an idea as to what they could expect to
get. That way they could easily decide if it would be worth the trouble.
- Wayde Allen