24 May
2014
24 May
'14
1:07 p.m.
On May 24, 2014, at 12:29 PM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
On 5/23/14 6:58 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
That?s one level of abstraction. Another possibility would be to view ?digital? data as
analog, which of course it actually is, and capture it at that level. It would take more
specilized hardware to do that, and the files would be a great deal larger, but it would
also capture detail that a digital representation hides. For example, damaged spots might
be recoverable if that is done. Something like the DSP based tape drive Paul Pierce built
(if I remember that one right) would be a way to capture old media at that level.
paul
What format is preferred when archiving tapes
without any bias toward the original system? In other words, what format is acceptable to
archivists?
I thought about your question a bit more, and we actually had a discussion about this
last week as we
just hired a new digital archivist at CHM.
Archivists would prefer to have the contents of the tape, not the image itself, since
that would
be of the most use to researchers in the future. Ideally, what would be saved is a
picture of the
container where all of the markings are visible, the image, a description of the image
format, and
the decoded and verfied contents of the image, along with SHA1 or better checksums for
fixity checking