Peter:
I'm just getting back to the e-mails that came in before I left for Oz. On the subject of hardcopy vs. digital I took your advice (see apended snippet of list posting) and went to http://ahds.ac.uk/depositors and found the following (bold highlighting mine):
"Data deposited with the AHDS will be migrated through changing technological regimes now and in the future. This provides a valuable insurance for the depositor against obsolescence or damage to their own copies of the data and will ensure that their resource will be available to future generations of researchers and scholars.
Access
Digital resources held by the AHDS will be migrated and maintained to preserve access for users who will be operating with very different computing environments. Resources in the AHDS's collections will also be catalogued professionally and according to appropriate standards."
My problem with this is that these statements presuppose funding going on for ever, and in fact an ever-increasing level of funding as the amount of material to be copied over into new formats increases faster than the unit cost of copying decreases. As the case of the gentleman in NSW demonstrated, continuing funding is never a given.
Of course, you are absolutely right in that hardcopy is subject to the vicissitudes of changes in writing styles and language, as well as those of lack of funding (again), fire, war, water damage, etc. Also, most modern papers are not nearly so durable as the ancient materials. Soft copy is also, as you point out, more easily distributable (tho' my wife the archaeologist says that many of her European colleagues do not always have ready access to a computer, and my father-in-law the translator of Roger Bacon used photographic facsimiles, which were also readily distributable once made, and a LOT easier to read than the examples of Beowulf and Magna Carta on the BritLib site). Soft copy is also immeasurably more manipulable/sortable, etc., than hard copy or photocopies.
I think that there are very few people who would advocate discarding all hard copy archives, or advocate seriously impairing the effectiveness of those libraries which contain valuable collections, so then we end up with the problem and cost of storing both hard and soft copy, as well as of creating the soft copy.
My fear is that, either because of plain old lack of funding due to a recession (as, for instance, the kind of withdrawal of support for libraries, archives and preservation that we are experiencing from all levels of government here now), or through an historically expectable cataclysmic change, material in both formats will be lost forever. So the issue really becomes a monetary and prediction issue: given various scenarios for the future of our society, what is the likelihood of preservation for data in various formats, and what mix of formats would maximize the effectiveness and minimize the cost of reconstituting the current body of world knowledge.
I am not convinced that the total cost of digitizing archives (especially old ones) and then maintaining them through thick and thin actually is actually lower than keeping hard copy. On this side of the Atlantic funds are always available for any project involving computers and IT, and these projects seem to eat all the resources thrown at them (e.g. 7 professional man-years to digitally archive the records from one relatively small Etruscan site near Siena). I think at Shell we probably approached 10 man-years to produce a web-accessible data-base of all the remote-sensing work that we had done in the previous 8 years (representing about 16 man-years to actually do the work). Although I have not been at Shell for 4 years, I still get calls to sort out problems that have appeared in the database during updates.
On the other hand, funds for conventional libraries and data storage are very vulnerable to cost-cutting measures.
It is (I would guess) much easier to learn to read a foreign or archaic language/script than it is to re-invent the CD and the formats and machinery (including whole computer operating systems - my wife's students who are still using Win95 cannot read the course notes on her web site) used to create, read and write it. My guess is that, given a repeat of the Dark Ages, the surviving hard-copy would be useful, but the surviving CDs, DVD's, etc. would be so inscrutable as objects to the denizons of the time that they would end up as household perishables (shaving mirrors?); and if recognized for what they were, would require such huge resources devoted to the retrieval of the info on them, that it would not happen.
Given the current state of the world, including the lack of interest in technical education in many western societies, the rise of religious fundamentalism in most societies, the increasing dominance of antediluvian social policies, and the increasing availability of Shrub's "WMD" to disaffected groups the world over, the probability of vastly increased energy costs, etc., etc., I think it would be foolish to assume that our society will be able to spend huge resources protecting its knowledge base (in any form) beyond the end of the current century.
That's a lot more than I meant to say. Sorry
John
Automatic digest processor <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
There are 6 messages totalling 268 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
4. History
5. New book / review
6. Digest - Mining History and the Coal Authority
Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:01:50 +0100
From: Peter Claughton
Subject: Re: Digest - Mining History and the Coal Authority
>Seriously, be thankful for all those boxes of records at the PRO, and pray
that nobody decides to "scan everything in" and destroy the originals (quite
common around here). Paper can be read for 500 years or so, digital data
become useless fossils within 10-15 years - try reading an old 9-track tape!
John,
Digital techniques have thankfully moved on since the '9-track tape'.
Digitisation is allowing access to material which would otherwise
deteriorate through over-use - for a good UK example see the work done on
the earlist surviving manuscript of Beowulf at http://www.bl.uk. There is
also now provision for archiving / long term preservation in digital form,
particularly for material which originated in digital format, most funding
bodies will make that a condition on any project they might support. See
http://ahds.ac.uk/depositors for a scheme suitable for material generated in
the mining-history field.
As to being able to read paper 'for 500 years or so' - the paper might be
fine if kept in the right conditions, but how many people can interpret the
text from 1503 even if it is written in English?
Peter
John Berry Associates
Geology & Remote Sensing
5000 Beverly Hills Drive
AUSTIN, TX 78731, U.S.A.
+1-512-452-8068 (Voice)
+1-512-413-9270 (cell)
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