Digital BW, The Print

On Nov 23, 2004, at 4:50 PM, Peter Nelson wrote:

>
>
> --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Roger Howard >
>> First, CD's have been around a lot longer than 5 years;
>
> Music CD's, sure, but CD-R/RW technology only became commonplace 5 or
> 6 years ago.

Since you only clipped two of the smallest points from my long and 
interconnected post, it's hard to respond tit for tat. However, the 
point was that CD reading compatibility - and that of most media - is a 
lot longer of a lifecycle than 5 years. Even legacy formats that were 
birthed in the infancy of the PC age have been broadly compatible - I 
can plug in a Zip drive from many years ago, or a CD-ROM, and still 
read it. This addresses the driver issues you referenced, more than the 
hardware availability; however, I don't believe a 5 year expectancy for 
modern, ubiquitous formats like CD and DVD is even close to realistic.

However, please note, I'm not defending blind reliance on physical 
media - I mentioned before that this is the real failure point, as 
hardware can and will go obsolete, fail, and so on. And as media 
becomes ever more complex (higher density, exotic encoding methods, 
etc) it becomes less likely that mere mortals in the future could 
reverse engineer these formats enough to build their own reader at home 
without significant resources. Physical media is the weakest link, and 
it takes real discipline to manage migration (but today, migration is 
primarily caused by degradation of the media, *not* format obsolescence 
- at least if we ignore tape, where formats come and go almost yearly).

Btw, I was producing CD-ROMs a lot longer than 5 or 6 years ago (and 
even did some CD-i before that). Those titles are still physically 
compatible with my latest DVD-RW drive, and will be with the next gen 
HD-DVD drives. That's a pretty good lifetime for format compatibility.

My main point is that the lessons learned in the early days of the PC 
revolution aren't entirely relevant to today. We do have real 
standards, meaning a substantial piece of the market implements a 
technology in compatible ways. This does aid significantly in the 
hardware longevity (as evidenced by the fact that I can still pick up a 
3.5" floppy drive, a decade after my earliest 3.5" floppies have 
completely gone dead!).

>>> So your plan forces your heirs and descendants to keep copying your
>>> images to whatever is current every few years!   That's a lotta
>>> trouble for them to go through!   What makes you think they'll be
>>> willing to do that?
>>
>> No, his plan requires him to maintain his collection,
>
> From the grave?   Remember - he wants to leave his stuff for when he's
> gone.

Agreed. And I did give some credence to the notion of archiving on 
analog media; it's not unheard of, and is low-risk; but there's an 
instantaneous loss there, so it really depends on what it is you're 
archiving, and how you intend for it to be used. Again, I agree that 
with a typical photograph, it's pretty portable between analog and 
digital (at least once it's done or "fixed" into a condition you 
consider ideal). If I were giving my grandmother a portfolio of 
photographs today, you can bet it would be in analog form. If I were 
willing my data to a descendant, it would remain in digital form, and 
it would become their property after my passing. My goal - 
professionally, personally - is in part to see the massive 
technological capacity available today leveraged, in part, to assure 
digital longevity. Archive.org and many other institutions are leading 
the way; Library of Congress has a massive new project funding basic 
research and projects to develop this capacity; the problems aren't 
insurmountable, they simply haven't been the focus of an industry that 
has been hell bent on squeezing profit and every last sale from the 
market; at this stage, personal computing is completely ubiquitous and 
the longevity issues are beginning to be felt and have to be dealt 
with, and they will (as other posters have alluded to). Microsoft, 
Adobe, Apple, and virtually every other industry leader is now seeing 
this, finally, as a critical issue - because if they don't, over the 
next decade they'll be left holding the bag in some real disasters - 
and in fact, as I mentioned, I predict this will happen (and in fact 
has to) in order to push us in the right direction.

Distributed storage, open file formats, ever increasing bandwidth, and 
the ridiculous processing and storage capacity of modern PCs, all lend 
themselves well to the task of safeguarding data in a way that analog 
media could never hope for. The problem has been the lack of 
engineering resources, and the lack of a market awareness, to 
prioritize longevity/preservation issues, beyond the usual 
admonishments from your IT guy to "backup regularly" (backups are 
purely for disaster recovery, not archival applications).

Anyhow, I don't think it's an either-or scenario. Digital and analog 
will continue to coexist; devices will always be available to digitize 
analog media (even if in the future it's simply a backlit slide holder 
attached to your 100megapix digicam), and devices will always exist to 
push bits back down to analog media (printing, barcoding, punchcards, 
waveforms etched in platinum, etc). There are some massive benefits to 
digital - and not just the instant benefits (easy, low cost, fits your 
workflow)... long-term benefits abound - bits are discrete, we can 
perform error checking and do infinite perfect copies, automation (good 
software) can let a single user scale up to ridiculous power. We're in 
the adolescent era of personal computing - all the power, but the 
brains haven't quite grown in to fit the body yet.

Digital photo preservation may not seem critical or even plausible to 
you; but it's a subset of a much larger, global problem, and there are 
literally billions of dollars on the table now, looking at it - and 
most of the bits concerned aren't so easily transferred to analog media 
as a photograph is. But maintaining a parallel analog collection today 
simply to save your descendants some effort is a bit extreme; if you 
maintain a good collection, a better use of your money otherwise spent 
on writing slides today would be to put it aside as part of the estate, 
to provide some funding to either support the digital collection after 
you die, or to provide funding to migrate it to analog the moment your 
body is cold.

Cheers,

Roger, who never lets a good digital preservation thread go unmolested!