Re: Has anyone looked at digital archiving?

[Cal Frye <cjf () CALFRYE COM>]

As we're talking about /creating/ paper records for archival purposes, don't you
find better results with OCR using a fixed-width OCR-type font?

I was working at a museum when they started digitizing the collection records.
No Y2K problem, there, as from the start four-digit year fields were necessary!
It was a standard consideration that as new records were entered into the
database, one of the output steps would be laser printed record on archival
paper. Machine-readable archives have also been migrated forward as systems
changed, but that's been a difficult road. Each department started out with
different software and here's a partial list of machines we first used: DEC
Rainbow, Northstar Horizon, Vector Graphics 4, Ohio Scientific...whatever the
donor would pay for ;-)

At least one copy should be in least-common-denominator format. We might suppose
RTF or DIF could do, but personally I'd also have plain-text and/or CSV. And
migrating the media as both media and OS are updated is always good. Eight-inch
floppies? Heck, even 5.25-inch drives are scarce these days! Reminds me...
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html

--Cal Frye, Network Administrator, Oberlin College
   www.calfrye.com, www.pitalabs.com, www.ouuf.org

  "Stop looking for happiness. Try creating it."


Graham Toal wrote:

> A paper dump is OK for text but not for code or just about
> any other form of data.  And OCR will probably *never* be
> good, just like voice recognition and handwriting recognition
> never will.  They're hard problems that aren't helped by
> bigger faster machines.