On Fri, 13 Jun 2008, Chris Hoogendyk wrote:

> Library Archivists are still searching for the holy grail in digital
> archival media and are not happy with anything currently available.
...
> Even paper and ink > have to be special to meet their criteria.

Quite. Even 1960s era punch cards in storage here are showing signs of
degradation. Reading them is a little problematic too.

> At present they are not satisfied they can even meet one human lifetime
> with digital media.

That shows a fixation with the digital information staying on one media,
which is the wrong approach given the short lifespan of any given
technology and why the archival setups I'm workng on are _DESIGNED_ to be
migratable from technology to technology in order to ensure that the trap
of long-life media but nothing to read it on doesn't rear its head as it
has done repeatedly in the past.

Putting this in context - the BBC commissioned a 20th century Domesday
book in the 1980s that was stored on a videodisc. The data on one of those
discs was only recently recovered and only thanks to a bunch of vintage
computer enthusiasts who had kept the technology alive.

Right now I have one senior professor who's asking if we have any way of
reading some old 9-track tapes containing important 40-year-old data. I
suspect there's nothing able to do this in the UK....



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