RE: Organization of archives

And one thing to consider is that good old analog (archival media, of
course) is the best long term solution to archiving something like a
photographic image. By storing actual prints or negatives or
transparencies, you'll always be able to read them, no matter how technology
changes (short of our eyes being superseded). That's one of the reasons
NASA decided to send up an analog audio disk (aka: a record, for those of us
old enough to still remember those quaint old things (and rotary dial
phones, to pick up from another recent thread)) on each of the Voyager
missions--a waveform analogous to the original sound was already there,
making mechanical replay a relatively simple process. If they had sent up a
CD or a digital tape and the playback hardware/software had broken down or
the storage medium had been corrupted, whatever race found the recording
would probably not be able to recover it.

In our world, colors may shift or fade and films/emulsions/papers may
deteriorate, especially when processed stored improperly, but there will
most likely still be some sort of a readable, recoverable image remaining.
Where bits and bytes are concerned, that is often not the case.

-Schuyler

-----Original Message-----
From: Katharine Thayer [mailto:kthayer@pacifier.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2005 1:35 AM
To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
Subject: Re: Organization of archives

Marie Wohadlo wrote:
>
> How about a "live archive" ---> a big disk or array? Maybe mirror it.
>
> How many removable media have come and gone? Remember the cantankerous
> Bernoulli, the omnipresent SyQuest, the cute little Zip, the humble MO
> (128mb, 230mn, 1gb, etc., etc., etc.).

Gosh, I'd forgotten about the Syquest. Most of my images from the 90s
are stored on 128 mb MO cartridges that I can no longer access.
Katharine
Received on Wed Jul 27 10:45:04 2005