Audrey,
You've hit on an aspect of digitization that few people plan for -
technology upgrades and obsolescence. Even if you save your digital
photos as TIFF or RAW files, any project needs to periodically review
the technology these files are stored on and upload the files to the
newest technology on a regular basis. This is a cost that a lot of
projects don't think to build into their budgets. As a result, they'll
have digital images of their sites/objects etc. which will eventually be
inaccessible because they haven't been transferred to new storage media
as technology changes. Case in point: how many of you have some of
those old 5 1/4 inch floppy diskettes around with critical documents on
them? Hmmmm?
My suggestion is to address this issue now, perhaps identifying the
oldest storage media and transferring those images first. If you have a
lot of large files, it might be easier in the long run to purchase a
separate large image server so that down the line you won't be dealing
with hundreds of "gold" CDs. And don't forget, that your image server
needs to have something of comparable size to backup all that data.
This could be a symposium topic: "DARM...Where Are You?" I'm old
enough to remember that television show "Car 54 - Where Are You?" which
is why this title comes to mind so readily. This issue has been
discussed in the past at annual meetings of the Museum Computer Network
and Museums and the Web.
Shirley S. Albright
Assistant Curator, Natural History Collections and Exhibitions,
Collections Database Administrator
New Jersey State Museum
33 W. State St., 3rd floor
PO Box 530
Trenton, NJ 08625-0530
(Office) 609.292.6331
(Fax) 609.292.7636
-----Original Message-----
From: Archives & Archivists [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Audrey Trauner
Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2006 12:22 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: digital images and longevity
Once again I turn to the list with a question about a dilemma that I
think
many of us are running into.
Since the advent of digital cameras more and more of our project images
are
being turned in on disk. In the past we have always had black and white
negatives, then color slides (but still usually accompanied by b/w
negatives also). By the way, we have images in our collection from the
1930's that are fine and with proper storage should last for many years
to
come. But now the trend seems to be towards using only digital cameras.
We
are requiring good (GOLD) disks but that still does not solve the
problem
of hard copy images.And then there is the problem of migrating the data.
I
am afraid that in years to come we are going to have a gap of a number
of
years where images for these archeological projects will not be
available
as the disks will fail. And I do not think paper copies are an adequate
substitute for negatives. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Audrey M. Trauner
Museum Technician
Southeast Archeological Center
2035 E Paul Dirac Drive
Johnson Bldg, Suite 120
Tallahassee, FL 32310
Phone: 850-580-3011 (ext 144)
Fax: 850-580-2884
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