Re: Has anyone looked at digital archiving?

[stanislav shalunov <shalunov () INTERNET2 EDU>]

Alan Amesbury <amesbury () OITSEC UMN EDU> writes:

> microfiche stored in old salt mines

This can work, but beware of non-archival bases (one would want
polyester, not acetate or polypropylene, which will degrade much more
rapidly); also, one would need silver halide in pure gelatin emulsion.

Microfilm is even more commonly available, but just to give a notion
of the degree of difficulty of getting it right with microfilm, Kodak
makes very few films with polyester base (look for ``base: ESTAR'' in,
e.g., EKTAPAN), and one of the best professional photo labs in this
country, A&I, will process none of them.

Also, consider the future.  Mechanisms to print on paper with
carbon-based toner and laser-based fusion are the most common
mechanisms of getting hard copies (black-and-white laser printers and
black-and-white photocopiers both produce excellent archival results
when paper is alkaline and adhesion is good).  Microfiche and
microfilm are already now exotic niche products.  Paper can be read
with a naked eye.  Microfiche and microfilm both require special
readers, quite unlikely to be produced 40 years from now.  While
rigging something up should not be too difficult in principle, paper
will be right there, and always easy to convert back into electronic
format; even if paper scanners cease to be produced for some reasons,
simply taking digital photographs of the sheets would work with paper,
but not with microfiche or microfilm.

The main advantage of microfiche or microfilm is reduced physical
storage space.  One would need to compare the costs of offsite storage
of paper with the costs of microfiche or microfilm before deciding to
go with the latter on storage space grounds, though.

--
Stanislav Shalunov              http://www.internet2.edu/~shalunov/

Heather has two mommies.  That's nothing.  The Internet has at least
two dozen daddies.