Rabs Posted March 4, 2013 Share Posted March 4, 2013 Rabs... Here's where "government" and "restrictive laws" get involved in the human factors of destruction of various materials. Given international copyright law and various other laws covering provenance of various materials, I'd honestly not accept the material you mentioned regardless that I had a "music museum" and archive. The bottom line is that cost of taking possession of these pieces even if "given away" is far less than potential future legal liability. That's why most museums today have stringent rules covering accession of materials. Heck, I hadda watch as years of news coverage photos went into a big brown dumpster - recording presidential visits, disasters, etc... I rescued one set of film I recognized on the top of the heap that I had shot, and gave it to the state archive that gladly received it. The rest dating back to around 1900 was gone to make way for a coffee room. Unfortunately current copyright law can at times appear to be a significant liability to preservation of our history. m Yeah ive seen some documentaries about that sort of thing (Good Copy, Bad Copy being one of them).. Its a bit sad that they would rather burn it than try to save it.. BUT as with that story I posted.. My first thought was DAMN I will take those tapes.. But the reality is that like the studio I would have to pay to store them, and what ever other up keep they need as would whoever took them.. AND as you say even if they gave them to me I could do nothing publicly with them anyway.. So they become useless to anyone as sad as it is.. But stuff from the 80s is one thing.. Destroying documentation from the 1900s just seems silly.. As you say any museum would be happy to take that on? Also its one thing that still has to be decided.. The big debate about online copyright... Its a tough one.. BUT imagine how much real history people will be able to learn in the future from all of the digital media of today. Obviously depending on how these laws end up :S Its like that meteor strike in Russia.. It was the first time its ever been caught on tape in human history.. And its down to our obsession with recording everything these days (and apparently Russias high road accident rate as a lot of them have car cams in case of accidents to prove liability:)) and look how many shots they got Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
milod Posted March 4, 2013 Share Posted March 4, 2013 Rabs... There are three difficulties with current archiving: 1. Digital isn't easily checked for change and it's easy to damage/destroy by accident or by intent. We don't even know what formats will be in use in 100 years whereas functionally writing preserved for thousands of years can be read as long as the language and writing itself are known. Otherwise it's inscribed on various media that likely will outlast the author. 2. Law: No, I wouldn't accept most "intellectual property" were I operating a museum/archive. It's too likely to become a point of litigation without significant knowledge of provenance and lack of certainty of ownership. 3. Technology itself is its own worst enemy when it comes to longevity of a number media. CB tells of a photo shoot in Italy. I can tell you that I lost virtually all my European color material some years ago after a 5-week assignment because of airport xrays regardless of protective packaging and assurance by airlines that it wouldn't be a problem. Also, even processed color films themselves fade even in total darkness. I think that short of solar flares or some other disaster that reproduction of digitized materials in standard digital formats could be considered to be safe for perhaps the next 25 years. After that... I'm not at all certain that short of constant re-saving in formats of the day would protect the material. Uwanna try to get 3/4 inch videotape onto a current digital format? Where and how much? Ditto 8-track or 4-track audiotapes. And if you did replicate the old formats, do you really "own" the material thereon; what happens when it's on the "cloud" assuming even the cloud lasts the next century? Will you have access even to your own material in another 40 years if you don't keep paying for that access on a regular basis? m Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GuitarBuilder Posted March 4, 2013 Share Posted March 4, 2013 I use Carbonite, I hope they are backing up my backup. As long as they don't go out of business! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
milod Posted March 4, 2013 Share Posted March 4, 2013 Yeah, and that assumes that in 25 years if you keep payin' them, that the format of your material will be readable. For example, I've lost all sorts of material I wrote on 8-bit machines in WordStar, and also almost everything written into a cupla older "desktop publishing" programs, not to mention more than a few pieces done in graphics programs with various proprietary file formats. Even older versions of such as Quark Express ain't necessarily forward compatible, not to mention backward compatible. Museum collection programs are similarly proprietary and scare the socks off me long term, let alone short term. m Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rabs Posted March 4, 2013 Share Posted March 4, 2013 I think that short of solar flares or some other disaster that reproduction of digitized materials in standard digital formats could be considered to be safe for perhaps the next 25 years. After that... I'm not at all certain that short of constant re-saving in formats of the day would protect the material. Uwanna try to get 3/4 inch videotape onto a current digital format? Where and how much? Ditto 8-track or 4-track audiotapes. And if you did replicate the old formats, do you really "own" the material thereon; what happens when it's on the "cloud" assuming even the cloud lasts the next century? Will you have access even to your own material in another 40 years if you don't keep paying for that access on a regular basis? m Yeah all good points.. I guess only time will tell on that.. Oddly I have been transfering old VHS tapes recently.. Stuff from people kids schools from the 80s and even my parents when they had a trip in 1961/62.. Its been kinda cool knowing that im saving these memories for people so that in the future they can be watched by kids and grandkids etc... If I hadnt have done that its almost certain that they would have just been thrown away and forgotten.. Now we can upload it to Youtube and the chances are it will still be there when im long gone... As for how long the internet will last and if all data will always be available.. Who knows... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GuitarBuilder Posted March 4, 2013 Share Posted March 4, 2013 Bad news, guys: All the media you use today (hard drives, flash memory, DVD, CD, BluRay) will be obsolete faster than you can blink. Your kids won't be able to read them in 20 years. It's totally irrelevant whether your archival CD will last 100 years or not. Why? Just try reading a 5 1/4" floppy disk from the 80's. The problem is that the hardware and software necessary will be long gone or in museums. The same goes for current storage media. The only good answer is to create physical products (books, photos, paintings, etc.). I'm afraid we're in trouble with music and video - there's no good way to preserve those. As a professional photographer, this is a very real problem for me. I have to constantly convert/move all my work to new media in order to preserve it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
milod Posted March 4, 2013 Share Posted March 4, 2013 GB... You don't wanna know how much of my work has gone down the tubes due to such tech changes. Hence my term "the human element" in aiding losses. m Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Izzy Posted March 4, 2013 Share Posted March 4, 2013 1. Digital isn't easily checked for change and it's easy to damage/destroy by accident or by intent. We don't even know what formats will be in use in 100 years whereas functionally writing preserved for thousands of years can be read as long as the language and writing itself are known. Otherwise it's inscribed on various media that likely will outlast the author. 3. Technology itself is its own worst enemy when it comes to longevity of a number media. m As someone here (I think it was charlie) stated, hard copies is what I'm going to put my money on. Wasn't there a library that was burnt ages ago and someone said, if it hadn't been burnt Columbus would have been heading to the moon and not accross the sea? The way I see it, it takes more effort to destroy hard copies. I can slam my copy of The Bostonians and crush a spider, but a nook? I don't know if they ever foresaw someone destroying those books and or what wonders which could have advanced us were lost in history's shuffle, but it could happen again, couldn't it? We could all lose touch and information access and have to start over...without hard manuals to help us decipher our world. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
milod Posted March 4, 2013 Share Posted March 4, 2013 Izzy... I hear where you're coming from, but... Color photos, slides and negatives are made from dyes that fade. Some handwriting inks ditto. Most commercial paper nowadays ain't gonna last all that long. Even a graphite pencil has perhaps a life of roughly a century. My great grandpa's 1860s diary was legible in the 1950s, not today. My Mom's typewritten transcription in the '50s is barely legible today and now, about 10 years later, almost impossible even for OCR - although the diary itself has been put into a number of web sites hopefully for posterity. You'd also be surprised at how many photos and printed pieces are functionally useless after 25-50 years. Laser and inkjet printer variations tend also not to do all that well for longevity except for a very few high end type of printer, paper and ink combinations. The strength to anything on paper is that as long as the language is understood, high quality printed material or written material that are protected from the elements, even indoors, is likely to last a long time. But I emphasize high quality and protective storage. The same holds for silver-based B/W photos. In the olden days when I first started using type/typesetting computers, folks bragged how that 14-inch one-megabyte hard drive could handle any and everything. <grin> Now at home I have roughly 5 tb of storage and wonder if that's enough to maintain duplicate backups. Is it reliable? I dunno, but... that's where my digital photos, a lotta digitized BW and lots of music reside. m Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quapman Posted March 4, 2013 Share Posted March 4, 2013 The beings in existence, at that time, would have no idea of what happened to us or how we lived or why we perished... Sometimes I think too much... :blink: I guess it depends on what "beings" are in existence. If it is still human beings then I would assume we could preserve our history reasonably well if we proactively store it along the way on the evolving technologies to come. If we are talking post apocalyptic/asteroid beings then the only thing that will be cast in stone, is what was actually cast in stone. Everything man made goes back into the earth eventually. Certain things may get preserved in ice or entombed in rock that may give some clues. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Twang Gang Posted March 4, 2013 Share Posted March 4, 2013 It won't matter. With the way things are going we won't be around another 100 years leave alone 500. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZenKen Posted March 4, 2013 Share Posted March 4, 2013 Jeez TG, cheer up will ya! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charlie brown Posted March 4, 2013 Share Posted March 4, 2013 It won't matter. With the way things are going we won't be around another 100 years leave alone 500. Yeah, I give us, until May...MAYBE?! LOL (Just Kidding...well, hopefully, anyway!) CB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RaysEpiphone Posted March 5, 2013 Share Posted March 5, 2013 Meh... digital devices will not be read-able in 18 months much less in 500 years. I do believe the Library of Congress is storing our nation's important document's in moisture resistant an cold locked area's of the building. Heat and water is the only real enemy to paper, barring bugs that is, as long as the building has electricity we'er good with that stuff. Water is bad for most ever thing really, with out active resurfacing of the concrete pile's on bridges they would fall apart in a few decades or so. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzZmkQT-lv8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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