Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/03/16

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Subject: [Leica] Preserving Digital Information in Archives
From: mark at rabinergroup.com (Mark Rabiner)
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:56:07 -0400

> 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.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information


We agree Ken.
It will be interesting to see how long this cherished prejudice by the
academic community and writers against digital is allowed to continue.
Its nuts. People love to read that stuff for some reason.
They think the weak points they get to attack without any backup is storage
and the evil  "Photoshop". Its mindlessness.
They just need to feel that digital photography is some kind of scam and not
"real" photography.

[Rabs]
Mark William Rabiner





Replies: Reply from kcarney1 at cox.net (Ken Carney) ([Leica] Preserving Digital Information in Archives)
Reply from photo.forrest at earthlink.net (Philip Forrest) ([Leica] IMG: Around Philly Today)
In reply to: Message from kcarney1 at cox.net (Ken Carney) ([Leica] Preserving Digital Information in Archives)