Digital BW, The Print

On Nov 24, 2004, at 2:09 PM, sinwen wrote:

>
> Peter,
>
> You are correct all the way through and express it much better than I 
> tried to in my previous post.
> Of course big companies or institutions digitilise their negs, for the 
> sake of immediate use only, when they need it, they cannot afford to 
> do it for all of their negs, far too expensive and time consumming.

Many major institutions and corporations are digitizing their entire 
catalog of analog media - slides, transparencies, etc - pro-actively. I 
manage these kinds of projects, at a major cultural heritage 
institution - the cost of digitizing and managing digital files is 
certainly not cheaper than managing analog media (at least for the 
first few decades the costs are not substantially different); the 
biggest benefit is especially where there is active use of the imagery 
- it must be preserved, and color transparencies only last so long, 
especially when used (even sporadically) for publications, 
presentations, etc. We've seen massive ROI in some projects within the 
first year; projected out into the future, these savings more than 
offset the costs of implementing and supporting these digital 
collections/archives.

> Sure enough data storage is a big challenge and the ideal solution is 
> not here yet but between silver gelatine and digital the more reliable 
> and the cheapest is surely the first one.

I disagree that the equation is this simple; many times it is not. 
Different institutions use image archives differently; in many cases, 
there are SUBSTANTIAL savings in the short term to be had with digital 
imagery. Stability of digital files is as good as the underlying 
systems - but in the best cases, it is perfect, where transparencies 
and prints are simply never perfectly stable.

Again, I believe there's room for analog media in the archives and will 
be for a long time; but digital is also extremely viable today - it 
simply depends what the needs are, what your infrastructure is like, 
and how savvy you are with one versus the other. I wouldn't trust a 
classical librarian to manage a digital archive, but I'm confident in 
my own ability to mitigate the risks. It's a highly variable process.

At the simplest level, if you're not willing to put any ongoing effort 
or thought into an archive (in which case I'd hesitate to call it an 
archive, but that's a different topic!) then I'd wholeheartedly agree 
your best bet today is with analog media. If you have active uses of 
your collection as well, in many many cases digital is not only more 
manageable, it can be cheaper and ultimately maintain more consistent, 
higher quality over time. There's no one easy answer though.

As for active effort, again I completely agree, and why my assessment 
earlier in the thread was that while the core technology is there today 
- massive storage capacity, highly reliable error resilient distributed 
storage, extreme processing power, and so on - the key to digital 
preservation will be when it is, by default, as easy as the prints in a 
shoebox that my mother maintains with no effort. Fortunately, the one 
true benefit of digital technology (automation) will eventually apply 
to preservation - it simply requires a level of automation and 
commitment by our vendors that isn't there, but will be - right now, 
the engineering efforts are focused on marketable features, and 
preservation is never a very marketable feature *until* disaster hits.

Let's just say that the history of analog photography preservation is 
not exactly devoid of problems; just look at the rocky history of color 
processes, especially with the rise of consumer color photography in 
the middle of the 20th century. It was a disaster from a preservation 
standpoint.

However, I think the one safe thing to say is that surely we're way off 
topic by now :)

Cheers,

Roger Howard


>
>   ----- Original Message -----
>   From: Peter Nelson
>   To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
>   Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2004 5:35 PM
>   Subject: [Digital BW] Re: how many REALLY do store digital copies 
> elsewhere
>
>
>
>   --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, The Wogster
>   <wogsterca@y...> wrote:>  So we need a
>> storage method that either uses more stable dyes, or a completely
>> dye-less process.
>
>   The problem with this whole discussion is that it focusses on the
>   technology - whether it's dyes, file formats, magnetic -vs- optical,
>   holographic -vs- linear, etc.    I'm going to guess that 95% of the
>   people in this forum are geeks and nerds of one sort or another (I'm
>   a hw/sw engineer), and human nature is a common geek/nerd blind spot.
>
>   But the PROBLEM isn't TECHNOlogical, it's PSYCHOlogical.   It has
>   little to do with technology and lots to do with human nature.   Any
>   archival solution that depends on active maintenance or intervention
>   on a regular basis will fail because someone will lose interest or
>   forget or will hand off a shoebox to someone without telling them
>   they have to update it every once in awhile, or they won't have the
>   technical skill, or they will dutifully DO the conversion but there
>   will be a bug in the conversion program that no one will realize
>   until 10 years later when someone else tries to do the NEXT
>   conversion, or they will guess wrong about what the next standard
>   format will be and convert it to something dead-end.
>
>   Christer thinks someone will be "in charge" of doing this stuff.
>   But we're talking FAMILIES here, not banks or hospitals or government
>   agencies where there are specialists and bureaucrats to be in charge
>   of things.   NO ONE will be in charge.  Someone will inherit an old
>   trunk with lots of memorabilia and it will get broken up and
>   distributed and stashed away and moved around.
>
>
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
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roger howard
email & im @ <rogerhoward@...>
website @ <http://www.rogerroger.org>
photos @ <http://www.rogerroger.org/gallery>