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Has anyone noticed if handling CDs marked with
water-soluble pens are smudging from sweaty fingers and other real-life
encounters? Is there proof that inkjet or thermal
printing on an appropriate surface does damage to the disc. How deep into
the surface do the alcohols bite before evaporating? Has anyone
exposed a naked gold-sputtered reflective layer to laser playback? It
seems to me the thickness of the coating should avoid damage to the
reflective surface and allow a margin of protection for printed labeling.
There is also the matter of practicality.
Most clients want to read what is on the CD from the CD surface itself, not have
to be dependent on a data-base look-up nor feel obligated to drop everything
else when a batch of CDs arrive and focus on getting the newbies
cataloged.
Recording at an institution within an
in-house, closed, controllable system is far different from what an
external studio has to to supply a variety of clients.
Though there may be better solutions to recording
quality than the 44.1, 16 bit standard of the CD, until there is as widely
dispersed a technology that allows recordings made at higher sampling rates,
etc. to be played back and are as practical to use, the CD will remain a
fact of life. The external hard drive, after all, uses a far more
vulnerable storage system. Now, if there were some way to make
what is recorded to a hard drive more permanent physically, not by
programming it shut, then.......
Interest in a significant portion of archival
material occurs only after the pendulum has swung away and back, 20 or 30
years. That's when I anticipate what we work on will be wanted.
And, surviving from today's technology, I see only the closed system CD
player as being widely available. SACD has a
long way to go in terms of market penetration before it should be considered for
archival use.
Or are we creating the need for future
services that will have inventories of present day, transient digital
systems the way we now have closets full of obscure analog playback
devices?
In short, what is our responsibility to future
users of the artifacts we create today, and how do we best meet it?
Steve Smolian
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