random stuff from an old archive bookmark file: http://www.oreview.com/9805harr.htm ( http://home.mira.net/~gharriso ) - (general technology issues in "Digital Preservation":) http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/rothenberg/contents.html ---excerpt--- http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/rothenberg/scope.html#technical ...Media obsolescence manifests itself in several ways: the medium itself disappears from the market; appropriate drives capable of reading the medium are no longer produced; and media-accessing programs (device drivers) capable of controlling the drives and deciphering the encodings used on the medium are no longer written for new computers. Upgrading to a new computer system therefore often requires abandoning an old storage medium, even if an organization still has documents stored on that medium. The dual problems of short media lifetime and rapid obsolescence have led to the nearly universal recognition that digital information must be copied to new media (refreshed) on a very short cycle (every few years). Copying is a straightforward solution to these media problems, though it is not trivial: in particular, the copy process must avoid corrupting documents via compression, encryption, or changing data formats. ... 5.2 Digital documents are inherently software-dependent Though media problems are far from trivial, they are but the tip of the iceberg. Far more problematic is the fact that digital documents are in general dependent on application software to make them accessible and meaningful. Copying media correctly at best ensures that the original bit stream of a digital document will be preserved. But a stream of bits cannot be made self-explanatory, any more than hieroglyphics were self-explanatory for the 1,300 years before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. A bit stream (like any stream of symbols) can represent anything: not just text but also data, imagery, audio, video, animated graphics, and any other form or format, current or future, singly or combined in a hypermedia lattice of pointers whose formats themselves may be arbitrarily complex and idiosyncratic. Without knowing what is intended, it is impossible to decipher such a stream. ... ---end--- - http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/1190/oracle/ORACLE_NT_CONFIG.pdf - http://www.ipass.net/~davesisk/oont.htm - http://www.geocities.com/tbcox23/ - http://www.oracle.com/oramag/oracle/00-Mar/index.html?o20rec.html - (from one of the Oracle guys at amazon.com:) http://www.speakeasy.org/~jwilton/hot-backup.html - ftp://oracle-ftp.oracle.com/dev_tools/patchsets/Installer/32bit/ - ftp://oracle-ftp.oracle.com/server/patchsets/wgt_tech/server/windowsNT/ - ftp://oracle-ftp.oracle.com/dev_tools/patchsets/Installer/32bit/ - http://www.swynk.com/friends/perron/wakeup.asp - http://www.swynk.com/friends/szabo/dbvisiogen.asp - -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Eric D. Pierce INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists -------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
