Re: Film Lover's Lament


"Colin D" <ColinD@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:44208FA9.2D818BDE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Jeremy wrote:

"Scott W" <biphoto@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1142960070.690849.292650@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Jeremy wrote:
Kodak has gone on record recommending that
consumers consider making prints of special shots, and keeping them
stored
in archival albums, just in case their digital files are lost due to
corruption of the media they are stored on.

Funny how Kodak keeps recommending that people use their products. :)

There is some truth to what they say and I do make a number of prints.

So far from personal experiance this is what I have seen.
Digital images have lasted the best,
next is prints.
next slides
last negatives.

I am not saying that digital storage does not have risks, but with a
bit of care they can
be pretty much eliminated.

Scott


The National Archives does not agree with you.

When the Clinton Administration ended, they looked for a way to archive
the
millions of email messages that were on the White House mail servers.
They
ended up printing them onto paper, then microfilming the paper and also
storing the paper.

I bet they kept digital files as well, and the microfilm/paper versions
were intended as secondary backups only.

The tone of your post seems fixated on the problems of digital storage,
but there are considerable problems with physical or analog storage as
well. The sheer space requirements, indexing, and searchability issues
are major with document storage. Imagine someone saying "I remember
Bill Clinton mentioning something about xyz in an email, way back." How
would you set about finding that email in a pile of millions of email
printouts? Or on microfilm? Whereas, searching a digital archive would
return you *all* mentions of xyz in a fraction of a second, as you no
doubt know.

Basically, once the amount of data stored with hard copy or analog
methods exceeds a critical point, that data is already effectively lost,
since the effort to find a given piece is beyond the time available to
find it, and the relevance decreases with time as well. Lawyers have
this problem with case law.

The Department of Defense requires certain sensitive or critical
plans/schematics/operating instructions to be submitted on microfilm, in
addition to any other electronic format such as PDF.

Again, I would think as secondary backup.

Part of the 1970 US Census has become lost to us, because the data files
can
no longer be read. One of NASA's missions to Mars has had a portion of
its
data lost because of corrupt and unreadable digital storage.

Part of the census problem is, as mentioned above, the sheer volume of
data from hundreds of millions of people, not to mention the statistical
derivations from that data. Way back in the year 1890, Hollerith
invented a sortable system of cards with punched holes around the
perimeter, to aid in speeding up the census results. In the 1900's IBM
and others got into the act with early computers. The actual census
returns were and are still stored as paper, and whatever calculations
and statistical results are required are now done with the computer data
derived from the paper. It is simply impossible to do it any other way
within a useful timeframe.

The parts of the 1970 census you say have been lost could be recovered
from the original stored paper - if sombody had the time and necessity
to do so. And that highlights what I said earlier about that data being
effectively lost, even though it still exists.

Nasa has lost more than that Mars episode. But, is it really lost? or
is it stored in a now unreadable format? This is the same problem that
those concerned about digital archival storage keep mentioning -
compatibility lost because of neglect to transfer the data to newer
standards. If they *really* needed to read that data, they could locate
or build gear that could do it. If the effort is greater than the need,
then it won't get done.

A new paradigm is needed here. Old ideas of archiving data meant
physical storage in a controlled environment, to preserve the original
documents as long as possible. Data was not considered as being
separate from the medium on which it is stored. Data storage was
evolutionary; better climate control, inert gas storage, low-light
environment, all of which extended the life of the media, but when the
media finally becomes unusable the data is lost.

The paradigm needs to be shifted to realize that the *information*
stored is what is being kept, not the medium on which it is stored. And
if it is trivial to transport the information to new media at intervals,
then that is what should be done.

Paper will eventually decay, microfilm will eventually decay.
*Information* decays along with it. Until now. We have, with digital
storage, the capability to store data *for ever*, without decay, simply
by regular and timely transfer of data to new media. That capability,
in anyone's language, is a revolution.

Colin D.

Well, there is no point in your arguing this with ME--you should call the
various Government departments that insist upon microfilm and tell them that
they've got it all wrong . . .

You are apparently convinced that long term archiving (i.e. for centuries)
is a simple affair--one that can be easily implemented. From what I've been
reading, institutions charged with maintaining digital collections do not
seem to agree with your perspective.

While digitization clearly offers benefits for short time horizon uses,
people that a re a lot smarter than me have gone on record as saying that
there are long-term issues that have yet to be solved, and that analog
storage offers a margin of safety for the time being.

By the way, the Census data CANNOT be reconstructed, because the paper
original documents were destroyed, leaving only the digital data. Did you
really think that the Census Bureau was just too lazy to go back to the
paper originals?


.

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