11 Mar
2011
11 Mar
'11
3:31 p.m.
On 3/11/11 2:05 PM, Richard wrote:
I guess I never thought about this before, but it
strikes me that
what's unique about digital archives is that they are "living" unlike
archives of traditional documents. You want to keep the digital
archive replicating to newer storage medium and actively test it for
integrity and redundancy because the bits themselves are what matter
and they are abstract and the medium on which they are stored is
transitory.
Interesting!
That is one of the problems that I have working with archivists trained
in the preservation of paper. We are blessed with working with our artifacts that
can be copied without loss, and can be easily indexed, but we have no media
of sufficient capacity or readers to recover them for more than a few decades,
and there is even less money available for digital archives than traditional paper
ones.