[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Longevity



One of the best e-mail newsletters that I receive that helps
me grapple with PC-related issues and suggests helpful
programs is the Langalist, published by Fred Langa.  You can
subscribe at www.langa.com.   He also publishes a "plus"
edition with a yearly fee but the basic newsletter is free.  The
item below appeared in the recent issue:

Reader Bob Schwartz asked an interesting question:
What do you and your readers recommend for all of us users of digital
cameras who have amassed a large number of pictures and would like to be
sure they will be available for future viewing? I still enjoy looking
through old picture albums of the family and want to be sure that future
generations will be able to view our electronic albums. Should I burn them
on a CD with a self-extracting viewer? Will people be able to view these
CDs 50 years from now? Which photo format has the lasting power and is
likely to be supported? Or should I do the sure thing and buy reams of
photo paper and print them all and put them in an album?
I have the same concerns for our written past like email correspondence. I
wrote almost daily to my son when he went away to college and can only find
some of those emails. Having changed and upgraded browsers and email
viewers occasionally, I seem to have lost some of them. As for the ones I
do have, is there a simple way to put them in some format or collection
which will organize by date and in a basic .txt or .doc (Microsoft will be
around forever, won't they?) so he and I can look back in history and see
what we were talking about back in the golden '90's? How about giving us
your best advice. Thanks, Bob Schwartz
Fifty years is a long time, but my guess is that JPG and TXT aren't going
to go away any time soon. The idea of burning your files to CD and
including a viewer (an image tool for the JPG files and maybe NotePad for
TXT) is fine, except that you probably have Windows applications now, and
even if Windows is around in 50 years, it probably won't run tools from
today's systems. But the JPG and TXT files themselves at least stand a
chance of being readable by the software of the day.
Plus, CDs are cheap enough so it's not a big deal to re-burn them from time
to time. If, some years from now, JPG is going away, you can use your
then-current system to re-save the JPGs in a new format, and burn a new CD.
(Actually, Writable-DVDs are the coming thing in storage: The
standards-wars are being sorted out now, and hardware prices are dropping
fast. In a year or two, DVD burners should be ubiquitous and affordable.)
But you'll need to pay attention to the media you buy, because some CDs may
not last all that long. (See
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20010719S0003 for more info.) There
will be similar concerns with future generations of DVD media, but there's
not enough data on them yet to call the shot. Stay tuned--- I'm sure we'll
have more info on the subject, and in less than 50 years, too. 8-)

Dean DeBolt
University Librarian
Special Collections and West Florida Archives
John C. Pace Library
University of West Florida
11000 University Parkway
Pensacola, FL  32514-5750
Tele:  850-474-2213;   Fax:  850-474-3338

A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to listserv@listserv.muohio.edu
     In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
                   *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
To post a message, send e-mail to archives@listserv.muohio.edu

Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
    http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>