30 May
2000
30 May
'00
11:57 a.m.
On Tue, May 30, 2000 at 05:19:45PM -0600, Richard Erlacher (richard(a)idcomm.com) wrote:
You don't get it, do you?
I'm saying it's probably a bad idea to use floppy media. This is because
it's mechanical, (2) because it's organic, and (3) because it is soon to
become obsolete. Aside from problems of data format incompatibility, you
have to deal with the mechanism to be able to read/write the archive's
constituent elements.
[snip]
If you're serious about creating an archive. It
needs to be permanent, so
it's essentially requisite that the media be write-once.
I haven't been following this thread, but I happened to notice this
post. I happened to be speaking to the chief archivist here at the
University today about electronic archiving, and the one thing that
came across in the conversation is that the bottom line regarding
digital archives is that archiving has become a continuous process.
From her perspective, it was simply that one could no
longer store
away paper and expect it to last hundreds of years; relevant to this
discussion is that the new approach to archiving revolves around not
only choosing media that will both last and not-be-obsolete for N
years, but also arranging the process such that in N minus epsilon
years, the media choice is re-evaluated and the archives rewritten in
the new media, and repeat.
Permanent digital archives, in other words, are the holy grail of the
archivist's realm. :-)
Of course, IANAArchivist.
-Rich
--
------------------------------ Rich Lafferty ---------------------------
Sysadmin/Programmer, Instructional and Information Technology Services
Concordia University, Montreal, QC (514) 848-7625
------------------------- rich(a)alcor.concordia.ca ----------------------