Storage IS a major issue. But yes, in fact my friend who's in
preservation says this is one of the major issues discussed at
archivist's meetings - file or media forward compatibility. It's
dizzying when you think about the tape days - 1/2 track, 1/4 track,
8 track, cassette, 1/4" 1/2", 1", 2" etc etc. And good tape decks
are high-maintenance machines. I have a nice Teac, but it needs an
overhaul and biasing before anything can be played on it. Need to
find some calibration test-tone tapes. The plot thickens.
Then there are floppy discs - computers don't even come with them
anymore. My Mom, a holocaust survivor, wrote her WWII memoirs on
one of those early Macs with the screen in the computer, on software
she didn't remember the name of. A few years ago she started trying
to get them published, and it took us MONTHS to find someone who
could open the disc. It turned out that the disc had the wrong
number of notches - which are used to differentiate DD and HD
floppies. That story ended happily enough, and it was some early
version of MS Word, but it could have been ClarisWorks or some
obscure file format that there was no converter for. It's
crazy. This was a very personal reminder of how much impact these
issues have.
For my part, I did a graduate degree in music composition in the
early 80's, and wrote a major orchestra piece for my thesis. The
magnetic tapes of the readings and performance of that are now
unintelligible. :-(
At 02:39 AM 3/9/2006, you wrote:
The problem I see is not so much storage but technology. Say you store
your CDs or DVDs (or tapes, flash cards, whatever) in a proper manner,
what kind of device are you going to use in 20 years from now to read
them?
Ken Durling
Composition and Music Services
Berkeley, CA
[510] 843-4419
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