Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/03/16
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]On 3/16/2010 4:40 PM, Mark Rabiner wrote: >> Perhaps of interest to those on the list whose images are wholly digital: >> >> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html?ref=books >> <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html?ref=books&pagewanted >> =all> &pagewanted=all >> >> > I'm surprised this one slipped though the whole premise is fantasyland > cherished in academia but in the real world people know better. > I trust digital media far more than I do film or paper. > > " authors, are ultimately just a series of digits ? 0?s and 1?s ? written > on > floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than > old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the > relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment " > > [Rabs] > Mark William Rabiner > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information > > My typical print file now is around 120mb. That is just the size of the tif file opened from raw in a SLR. A scan of a 35mm slide is around 100mb. So I would say that floppy disks, CD's and DVD's are out of the equation, not that they are reliable anyway. (I wonder if the curator at the Houghton Library really just stopped at storing John Updike's 5 1/4" floppies in "climate controlled stacks".) Finding stuff is not that difficult, though if you have a lot of images you may have to draw a line in the sand and begin cataloging from that point forward, as I did. If reliability of the digital media, or the lack of a migration path, is really an issue, then business and scientific enterprises are in real trouble.