9 track tapes and block sizes

On 10/3/20 3:20 AM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote: The Bag-it scheme is interesting in that it can be used to hold data and metadata in an XML-style container, be the object a floppy disk or a spear point, but where are the standards for digital media for *what* must be preserved? It seems to me that professional digital archivists concern themselves with preserving content, but have few resources to determine context. The number of tapes that I've handled that bear only a tape number at best is alarming. Various government warehouses still have acres of the stuff. Labels dry up and fall off and aren't replaced (that goes for floppy media also). Nobody is left to interpret what the bits mean, much less the context in which they were created. In that sense, my hat's off to the "living history" transcribers who preserve context, but not necessarily content. A personal concern as I'm forming stronger relationships with the medical community in my dotage is that vast amounts of information will inevitably be lost in any case. In particular, consider a government project where several hundred millions of 1970s dollars were spent by the government, yet almost nothing other than a few papers survives. Those involved with intimate knowledge are inexorably dying off as the community ages out. The lessons of "what did we learn form all of this?" will be gone forever. Sometimes it seems that we spend as many resources in forgetting as we spend trying to remember. --Chuck