Re: [ARSCLIST] Article about digital archiving in the NY Times

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard -- YESS! The whole concept of "vault" and "archive" needs to be re-conceptualized by the 
keepers of the intellectual property and/or valued cultural gems. It's no longer "put this in a dry 
room in acid-free paper and keep good track of it so it doesn't get lost." It's now "get this 
fragile digital stuff migrated to an automatically-backed hard drive farm, and be responsible with 
upgrading to latest/greatest concept of what mass-storage is". This can all be automated but what 
constitutes an "archivist" may be more a computer programmer than a librarian.

One interesting topic I discussed off-list is, what do you do with an outmoded digital format once 
you've made a bit-perfect transfer? The person asking me had finally magrated all his Sony F1 tapes 
to hard drive, using the last generation F1 adapter that had SPDIF output. He was debating whether 
to dumpster his aged Betamax and tapes. Think of this on huge scale for a record company with acres 
of 1630 tapes.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 8:11 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Article about digital archiving in the NY Times


> At 07:32 PM 2008-04-09, Bob Olhsson wrote:
>
> > My point is that nobody can possibly afford to go out and build a DAT
> > machine from scratch, much less a Soundstream or 3M. digital player.
>
> Agreed, Bob!
>
> That was my point about a week ago when I found out that the Honeywell 101 Instrumentation 
> recorders are still available -- 
> upwards of $100,000 each!
>
> On the other hand, if you have online digital archives (i.e. storage connected to a LAN) you can 
> issue the equivalent of:
>    copy \\oldarchive  \\newarchive /s
> Go away for X number of days
> Run the MD5 comparisons on newarchive
> and you're done.
>
> It is a far cry from trying to play old 3M digital tapes, all of which should have been migrated 
> when there were machines.
>
> The dead issue isn't digital, but shelf storage that is non-robotic or non-connected.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
>
> Richard L. Hess                   email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Aurora, Ontario, Canada       (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
> Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
> Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.