On Sun, 2002-11-10 at 17:25, Curt Vendel wrote: In my genealogy hobby (and in my wife's scrapbooking hobby) this is a major concern. The yellowing is caused by various acids used in the manufacturing of the paper. The only real way to prevent yellowing is to use acid free paper and ink. Unfortunately, newspapers do not do this. The best you can do is to keep them out of the light. I would also recommend going to a scrapbook store and purchase archival quality plastic covers instead of plain old plastic magazine covers. One thing I did with a one hundred and fifty year old family bible was to photograph the family record pages using using a Minox-B camera (1960's movie spy camera) and Agfapan black and white film. The negatives will keep almost forever and I can make new prints whenever I need to. -- Christopher L McNabb Operating Systems Analyst Email: cmcnabb(a)4mcnabb.net Virginia Tech ICBM: 37.1356N 80.4272N GMRS: WPSR255 ARS: N2UX Grid Sq: EM97SD

I would lok at putting them on a CD. Most newsprint is not made from "acid-free" paper. Therefore it will crumble to powder in a few years. Librarians go through extrordinary procedures to remove acidity but only for some select, rare books. If you want go that route ask in the state archives or a big university library. Regards Harsha Godavari Christopher McNabb wrote:

Great info, thanks Chris. Curt ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher McNabb" <cmcnabb(a)4mcnabb.net> To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, November 10, 2002 5:58 PM Subject: Re: Preserving Newspaper. on they will appreciated.

On Sun, 10 Nov 2002, Chandra Bajpai wrote: Usually you are lucky to get 3-5 years out of CD-R media (in my experience anyway), as manufacturers really seem to overestimate the time it takes the organic dye compounds to break down. The other common problem is the tarnishing of the aluminum layer, often due to a poor topside coating. Of course, sharpie and other solvent based markers as well as some labels can also damage the coating. Personally, after way too many problems with CD-R media, I'm quite weary of using them for any sort of important/archival use. I recently came across some rather interesting bits of information on CD-R media at: http://www.mscience.com/ They also have a survey/test of 100s of discs up at: http://www.mscience.com/survey.html -Toth

I've heard a lot of Taiyo Yuden...what makes them better than anyone of the others? How do you know you are getting one of theirs vs. other mfgs (as you just experienced) -Chandra -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-admin(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Eric Smith Sent: Sunday, November 10, 2002 8:37 PM To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org Subject: Longevity of CD-R (was RE: Preserving Newspaper.) I'm not sure I'd even count on twenty years for silver CD media. Oxygen seeps in and oxidizes the reflective layer, reducing the contrast ratio well below what a drive can discern. I've seen this happen to poorly made audio discs in less than ten years, and there's no reason to believe that cheap CD-Rs are any better. Gold media (with an actual gold reflective layer, not just gold-tinted dye) should last over 100 years. Kodak did accelerated aging tests and found that 100 years was a reasonably conservative estimate. They used to have a detailed white paper on their web site, but it doesn't seem to be available any longer. Of course, it is always possible that there is a failure mode that is not modeled accurately by accelerated aging tests. I'm completely unimpressed with the newer Kodak gold and silver mix. There's not enough gold to see, so there's not enough that a drive will be able to see it after the silver oxidizes. Unless there's some pretty amazing chemistry going on in there. Kodak seems to be mostly out of the gold CD-R business, but Mitsui and Taiyo Yuden still make gold media. It's hard to find at retail, though a Google search turns up plenty of mail order sources. Of course it is much more expensive than silver. I have a supply of Kodak gold media I use for discs I intend to keep for archival purposes. For everything else I use silver media. For a few years I've been buying TDK spindles of 50 discs at Costco. The media was made by Taiyo Yuden and was quite good as silver discs go. Unfortunately the last time I tried to buy some, they only had TDK 100-disc spindles. Not realizing that the media was different, I bought one, and was appalled to find that about 20% of them were bad. The ATIP data indicates that these discs were manufactured by CMC Magnetics, one of the *worst* manufacturers. I can't believe that TDK switched from the best to the worst! Now I'll probably start buying bulk-packaged Taiyo Yuden discs by mail order. Eric Eric

On Sun, 10 Nov 2002, Eric Smith wrote: You can't always trust that data though. Its unfortunately common for some CD-R manufacturers to sell off old glass masters to budget CD-R companies, who (obviously) can't change the data (that would require creating a whole new glass master). Such companies may then use any one of the numerous dye compounds when making the actual CD-R, which very well may not reflect the stored ATIP data from the glass master. -Toth

On Mon, 11 Nov 2002, Eric Smith wrote: Another (slightly more legitimate?) reason for selling off a master is the seller is changing the characteristics of the CD-R they are producing. The buyer of course, can do whatever they want with the master once they own it, even if they initially use it to continue to produce a similar CD-R. Sadly, this is common practice. Creating masters is also probably the single most expensive part of setting up a huge run of CD-R discs. If a budget manufacturer has a way to cut corners and or costs, they are usually going to do so... I seem to remember reading about some companies falsifying ATIP data in the past. I don't remember the specifics, but Google may turn them up. I dunno if a manufacturer would bother to take legal action over something like that either, since it might be hard to prove or even present in court, and by the time its discovered, 100s of thousands (if not more) counterfeit discs could already be in customers' hands. I've had good luck with Taiyo Yuden discs that I got from some software vendors (custom software in small batches), but I've not used them much myself. I had horrible experiences with a couple types of CD-R media (burned by other people where I worked), and it pretty much put me off of CD-R in general. Of course, then we had the flooding down here in Houston in 2001, which ruined (* maybe?) 100s of CD-R backups, while the older tapes were/are salvageable. * - Does anyone know how to recover CD-R media that was submersed in very nasty water/sewage for the better part of two weeks? (They've since been cleaned/decontaminated) I didn't notice much in the way of physical damage to the reflective layer, but I suspect there may be some discoloration of the reflective layer at fault in some cases. I didn't have much luck with 'dd' on a Linux box, but perhaps there are better methods, possibly by somehow reading the CD-R directly, one bit at a time? -Toth

Quothe Curt Vendel, from writings of Sun, Nov 10, 2002 at 05:25:59PM -0500: [...] Aside from deacidification, etc., you could scan them in at a high resolution and print them out on acid-free paper (such as 100% cotton paper or acid-free ink-jet paper). Aren't there archival-quality inks out now for ink-jet printers? I'd suggest a laser printer, but, after time, pages stick to one another and the printing comes off. Does anyone know why there's such little emphasis on permanance in the computer industry? ... an industry which often resembles a bunch of chickens running around with their heads cut off. -- Copyright (C) 2002 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & rdd(a)rddavis.org 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify such http://www.rddavis.org beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.

On Sun, 10 Nov 2002, R. D. Davis wrote: That's easy--there's no money in it. -brian.