Bob - thank you very much for that. I am fiming the
old people dancing in Southern Ireland and am on the
point of digitising all my analogue footage. Hmm - big
problems. I guess B&W film stock is the answer!! Many
thanks for the mailing list info. Chris B.
--- Bob Trubshaw <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> At 16:53 13/06/02 +0100, you wrote:
> >Am very concerned at hearing that the life of CDs
> is
> >limited. And without a copyright waiver does that
> mean
> >that libraries holding rare scanned documents
> cannot
> >refresh the CDs to preserve the images? The Library
> of
> >Congress in Washington reckons that it will 'lose'
> 90%
> >of all of its magnetic holdings - video/audio tapes
> -
> >in the next 100 years (discounting changes of
> format
> >and the fact that machines to play the old formats
> >might become obsolete). So they are digitising
> >everything they can. So what it wrong with CDs? Are
> >they even more fragile than magnetic video tape.
> The
> >life of the latter is about 30 years after which
> the
> >adhesive holding the magnetic particles onto the
> >plastic base decomposes into a white dust which
> clogs
> >up the heads. What happens to CDs?
>
> With commercially produced CDs and CD-ROMs the
> relective aluminium coating
> slowly oxidises and/or delaminates from the clear
> plastic. With CD-Rs and
> CD-RWs the dyes used are also susceptible to
> degradation (probably in only a
> few years ...). More often, CDs and CD-Rs etc 'die'
> because they get
> scratched or dirty. Unlike audio recordings on
> magnetic tape (which
> progressively loose quality), all digital media are
> vulnerable to 'all or
> nothing' data loss - a small amount of damage to
> critical parts of the CD
> could mean all the information is unretrievable.
>
> Copyright law has been tightened to protect
> copyright until 80 years after
> death of the author. This totally frustrates
> 'reprinting' and the like.
> With multi-author works (LSJ is an excellent
> example) in, let us say, 50
> years time, there is little chance that all the (by
> then mostly deceased)
> authors will have appointed a literary executor and,
> even if they had, who
> will know who that person is?
>
> More crucially, in 20 years time working CD players
> will be much rarer than
> people who can use slide rules are today , as other
> storage media are
> already poised to take their place (OK, I accept
> that 'next generation' DVD
> players are backward compatable with CDs, but solid
> state storage -
> Gigabytes in a 'key fob' - is already a reality).
> And the software to read
> the CDs that is so commonplace today will only run
> on hardware that has been
> kept working by dedicated specialists in museums ...
> (in reality HTML is
> quite likely to be one format that will be supported
> 'forever'.)
>
> Makes maintaining paper-based archives seem easy,
> doesn't it???
>
> All these complexities of digital archiving have
> their own discussion lists,
> although the only one I know is
> <[log in to unmask]>.
> British archaeology has its own digital archiving
> project at York, where
> excavators pay a flat fee to have their archives
> 'deposited' and curated -
> even if this means transferring the data to
> non-proprietary formats.
>
> Hope this helps a little.
>
> Bob
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