On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 11:25:09PM -0700, Jim Brokaw wrote:
> on 6/27/02 6:56 PM, John A. Lind at jlind@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> > At 17:48 6/27/02, Jim Brokaw wrote:
>
> Well, I guess I need to step up and *not* defend myself... my intention with
> my post is to suggest that digital archives, properly maintained, may be as
> archival or long-lasting as film archives. This has turned into an
> interesting conversation...
> >
Yes, and it is a importend discussion which really hits the point for
everyone who wan`t to store his photographs for the future!
Well, personaly I will never rely too much on the latest technology.
O.k, you will never have full guarantee.
Sure the 1975 color images in my personal album don´t look great any more.
I`m glad that my parents also used b&w sometimes :-).
On the other side from my (grand-) grandparents, we still have faded, but
"readable" pictures telling us about the live of our ancestors in the beginning
of the last century.
This is what I can prove. I´ve no experience with fifty year old CD-RW`s.
But I´ve smashed my 5 1/4"- disks form the C=64 some time ago.
I´ve tryed to convert them to PC, but it was way too painfull for their content,
altough I organized some of my personal data with them.
The well respected german computer magazine c`t reported about this issue
several times, but they don`t know what will happenin the future. some points:
* The NASA is looking to buy used old fashined 8086-processors to keep the
space
shuttle running!
* A lot of data from the early NASA Viking-missions are lost due to tape errors.
* To years ago the CDR manufaturer overbet each other with CD-live expectancy
from
100-300 years, based on aging test where nobody knows about their significance.
So they only guaranteed for 5-10 years, but made a big mediahype
with the 300yr. record. Do you trust them?
* Magneto optical tecnology, produced from Olympus and Fujitsu guarantees
for 30-50yr`s, but more expensive now.
* Digital data need`s to be copyed to new medias from time to time. Who will
do this?- especaily for a lot of amateur photographs? - Altough some of them
might get valuable in the future?
A lot of grandchildren find exciting pictures of former live in the forgotten
shelves of their grandparents. Would they ´ve been copyed?
*Historian expect an source gap in the future, when later generations want
to investigate the beginning of the digital area, until save data storage
will be handled.
* There are a lot of levels where digital data can be lost: media; hardware;
bit-encoding; file format; interface; OS; software; compression; file format.
Who will know what will be available in the future? One gap in the cain, and
your data is lost.
* A film based image will slowly fade away. It is easy to determine, when it
is necessary to duplicate it to save the remaining content for the future.
But what with digital. Either it is lossless available or total lost. It is
hard to
predict the day, when it must be copyed.
O.k well, Now I will go and check my now 10`yr old first OM-slides, and
be quiet for the future. No it is too much work to scan all of them and I´m
too busy in producing new ones :-))
Frieder Faig
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