Re: Film Lover's Lament


"rafe b" <rafeb@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Jeremy" <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Microfilm stored under proper conditions has a projected life of 500
years,

So this is a "projection" you trust, without question?

and it requires only a light and a magnifier to enable it to be read.

Well, if you want a useable print, it takes a bit more than that...
There's a whole infrastructure of chemistry, for example.

And, the microfilmed images can always be re-digitized into whatever
image formats are currently in use at any time in the future. So an
analog backup may in fact be better for long-term storage to ensure that
the file's contents remain readable long after media and file formats
have changed. We simply do not know what the landscape will be like in
two centuries. What we take for granted today, in terms of file formats,
may be virtually unreadable then.


In two centuries, at the rate we're going, we'll have far
more serious issues to deal with.

There's no reason to presume that digital file formats will
necessarily disappear. There are so many good, and
*important* images now in JPG, TIF, and PSD formats
(to name a few) that we can assume these will last for
generations to come. The standards are in the public
domain, and thousands of implementations (eg. of TIF
readers/writers) exist.

The *media* on which the files are stored -- ah, that's
a very different issue. Personally, I think punched
cards of Solomonic gold are the way to go.

Personally, I try to assume as little as possible. I make
multiple copies of my images, on multiple media, and
spread the copies around. And every now and then,
I retrieve some of those copies and make sure they're
sill readable.


rafe b
www.terrapinphoto.com



1: My comments were centered more on document imaging than photos.
Microfilm is not an appropriate choice for photographs, although color
separations might be.

2: The US Government requires that certain classes of important documents be
stored on Microfilm, not as PDF files, for LONG TERM archiving. The
National Archives has had a number of well-documented problems with digital
image files being unreadable because vendors that offered proprietary
formats went out of business, leaving no sources for hardware to read the
tapes.

There was an article a few years ago in the New Yorker magazine that
described this in some detail, and it was truly an eye-opener. I had
previously thought, along with just about everybody else, that documents
saved in digital format were safe. It turns out that the long-term
prospects are very risky.

Everyone is working on this problem, but for now digital archiving remains
risky.


.

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