Digital BW, The Print

> Tim, I have read arguments that no form of digital storage can be
> considered
> archival since it is dependent upon a machine for retrieval. What is the
> current thought on this?

Oh God - it's a never ending argument like film vs digital or nikon vs
canon, and you can't shift those on either side...

point is, re-formatting of all sorts of different things - sound tape, video
etc is a normal part of an archives work and process. Re-formatting digital
image files should be no different.

Second point - if the choice is between negatives that have or may be
turning to vinegar/dust (cf. the Bettman Archives and Corbis' underground
cavern) and a digital file of that negative that you have to reformat every
few years - what's the choice?

Here's a quote from a friend who has (as you can see) been involved in the
internet from the beginning (being one of the "founders" of Usenet for one
thing, and now involved in Google):

"Digital can be archival. It's just not automatic yet. I have digital
archives that date back to 1967, which is when I first started keeping
digital information that mattered to me. It is now 36 years later, and I
still have all of it. Today my digital archives are about 100GB; I think
that they didn't exceed 10MB until 1970.

The "secret" is very simple. Make a copy onto two different media every 5
years. At least one of those media will still be around in 5 more years, and
you can repeat the process.

Currently my digital archives live in 3 forms: IDE hard drives that are
turned off and sealed DVD ROMs (33 ROMs hold everything) DDS3 DAT tapes (10
tapes hold everything)

I also keep everything online on regular servers.

At some point in the future some new storage technology will come along, and
I will copy my archives onto that. I suspect that if I die before a truly
archival technology comes along, my children will have no trouble reading
any of the archival media and continuing this tradition of copying should
that be what they want."

Archives do this kind of stuff all the time in all sorts of media. So the
old "you won't be able to read a CD in 6 years time" or "they won't be able
to open a tiff file in 2020" argument is moot. Bear in mind as well, as much
stuff from archives is lost from fire, theft, flood, earthquake etc as from
deterioration, then with digital, copies can be stored in more than one
place.

And on that, I'm not going to argue any more on the archiving digital
issue...!

tim