Picture Albums of the past

Yet we overlook — at our peril — just how unstable and transient much of this information is. Amid the proliferation there is also constant decay: phenomena such as “bit rot” (the degradation of software programs over time), “data rot” (the deterioration of digital storage media) and “link rot” (web links pointing to online resources that have become permanently unavailable) can render information inaccessible. This affects everything from holiday photos and email correspondence to official records...

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MurrayM said:

If you're thinking of going digital for long term storage of your photographs, better think again

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Shoalwaters said:

Your post seems to have two principal concerns:

i) The location (online, hard drive, CD etc) where you store digital files may cease to exist.

ii) The digital files will slowly become corrupted and thus unusable.

I understand the first proposition - CD's get damaged, computers malfunction and digital storage companies go out of business. But is there any solid evidence that my photos and memoirs stored on a CD or GoogleDrive will turn to digital mush in a few years? If so, who did the research and where is it to be found?

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Digital preservation raises challenges of a fundamentally different nature which are added to the problems of preserving traditional format materials. By digital preservation, I mean the planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies necessary to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable...

Recording media for digital materials are vulnerable to deterioration and catastrophic loss, and even under ideal conditions they are short lived relative to traditional format materials. Although archivists have been battling acid-based papers, thermo-fax, nitrate film, and other fragile media for decades, the threat posed by magnetic and optical media is qualitatively different. They are the first reusable media and they can deteriorate rapidly, making the time frame for decisions and actions to prevent loss is a matter of years, not decades...

Most librarians and archivists have accepted the basic wisdom -- for now at least -- that digital preservation depends upon copying, not on the survival of the physical media (Lesk). But copying, also referred to as "refreshing" or "migration" is more complex than simply transferring a stream of bits from old to new media or from one generation of systems to the next. Complex and expensive transformations of digital objects often are necessary to preserve digital materials so that they remain authentic representations of the original versions and useful sources for analysis and research (Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information)...

Probably the most commonly used preservation strategy is to transfer digital information from less stable magnetic and optical media by printing page images on paper or microfilm. It seems ironic that just as libraries and archives are discovering digital conversion as a cost-effective preservation method for certain deteriorating materials, much information that begins its life in electronic form is printed on paper or microfilm for safe, secure long-term storage. Yet, high-quality acid neutral paper can last a century or longer while archival quality microfilm is projected to last 300 years or more. Paper and microfilm have the additional advantage of requiring no special hardware or software for retrieval or viewing. Perhaps this explains why in many digital conversion projects, the digital images serve as a complement to rather than a replacement for the original hard copy materials (Conway, 1994)...

Much remains to be done in research, development, and implementation before we can assume that even a small portion of our digital heritage will survive more than a few years. It is fair to say that the state of development in digital preservation remains largely experimental. Only a few libraries, archives, and other institutions have established digital preservation programs, while most research and innovation comes from pilot projects and prototypes. Tested methods that have proven effective on a small scale in a limited number of repositories are not feasible for preservation of many of the types of digital materials that archives and libraries will confront in their preservation endeavors.

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MurrayM said:

Hi there,

As a large format film photographer I admittedly carry a bias against some aspects of digital photography. I'm not totally against digital though, as I'm considering polymer photogravure which has several intermediate steps (negative scanning and digital printing for the etching plate) going from film to etching ink on cotton rag paper via an intaglio press.

A big concern for me is knowing what I produce will survive long term if handled and/or stored properly. This is one of the reasons why photogravure is so appealing; if stored properly images will last potentially thousands, not hundreds of years.

Here's some extracts from an article entitled, "Digital preservation: a time bomb for Digital Libraries" by Margaret Hedstrom, Associate Prosfessor in the School of Information and Libary Studies at the University of Michigan.

Link to article at bottom if you want to read the whole thing.

Mass storage and long-term preservation

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Donsan said:

Maybe I am being simplistic but it would seem to me libraries should follow same policies as corporations and have Data Backups, Disaster Recovery Plans/Continuity of Operations Plans and also ongoing technology evolution assessments. Not sure I am buying this academic argument on the short life of digital media. And microfiche, thermo fax, etc was not digital media.

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