11 Aug
2007
11 Aug
'07
11:47 a.m.
Chris M wrote:
Senseless point to contemplate, but I have to wonder
why some bona fide collectors choose not to
participate (or at least monitor from time to time) a
vintage-based mailing list.
Too busy. I'm the same at the moment - I'm pretty much skimming the list every
few days. The content's interesting enough, and it's taking a lot of willpower
not to reply to more than one or two posts (hence I can see why some people
don't subscribe at all even though they know the list is here)
But frankly it does piss me off to think that there
are ahem resources out there that are going untapped.
I know what you mean there - it is frustrating when you know that someone out
there probably has the answer to a problem, but you just don't know how to
reach them...
Loads of people even on this list are sitting on
stacks of old floppies, and don't even take the time
to ensure the data therein won't be consigned to
oblivion. I mean how much effort does it take to set
up some 486 or early P- w/a 5 1/4" floppy drive, and
get on with it?
Fscking lots, believe me. Stuffing disks into drives is time consuming enough,
but probably only takes up half the time - the rest is in understanding enough
about what wrote the disk in the first place to make sure it's imaged
correctly, and in properly recording enough visual detail* about the label and
jacket. That and doing re-reads to get around problems, keeping drive heads
clean etc.
* I'm coming around to thinking that for the museum media we should probably
be scanning low-quality (visual) images of the disk/jacket. It's surprising
how many disks I find where the labels are badly hand-written and open to
interpretation; once someone's done a best-guess interpretation in ASCII, it's
possible that information can be lost... (the other one is that in some cases
it's the *layout* of the label data which can provide clues as to what
something might be, rather than the character data itself)