http://www.newfangled.com/its_time_to_start_a_digital_conservation_movement Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:18:15 -0500 Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:18:15 -0500 Henry Newman muses that in order to preserve data for even close to as long as the Egyptians have, we need a framework that can transfer and maintain metadata between systems.]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/16957#comment16961 Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:17:33 -0400 http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/16957#comment16978 Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:38:27 -0400 This article came out yesterday and it seems as if you read this author's mind.

Maybe Facebook and its users alike should be conscious about how much data is stored on their servers.

Article about Facebook asking for $100 million to maintain their servers]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/16957#comment16989 Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:23:14 -0400 http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/16957#comment16990 Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:23:23 -0400 http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/16957#comment16993 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:08:20 -0400
You're right- Google can afford to offer us all the free app candy they want because the more data we give them, the more advertisements they can sell. Advertising is how they can afford to subsidize a huge amount of R&D that goes toward the creation of great tools like Gmail, Google Analytics, etc. I mentioned this in my newsletter, To Buy or To Build. In a significant way, what Google is doing skews the entire development industry. Since the advertising subsidy is almost invisible to many users at this point, the perception of value has changed. People expect way more for way less now. It's a reality we grapple with very often, but that means that one of our jobs has to be to continually educate our clients and clients-to-be as to what the real value of working with us is. In addition to the development and the applications they get, they're also getting a dedicated relationship with human beings that are reachable by phone and email. Google does not offer that!

Thanks for reading and commenting,

Chris]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/16957#comment16996 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:16:14 -0400 http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/16957#comment17012 Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:21:01 -0400
Wow, you're definitely making your presence known with your comments! I think you might be getting the wrong idea about what I'm saying with this post. I'm not trying to be a complainer. On the contrary, I'm trying to talk more about the acceleration of storage and power use in this industry, and how consumers have been quickly acclimated to that increase. While it definitely has an environmental impact, it also has a financial one, too- both are concerning. As far as the environmental issues are concerned, I think it would be a mistake to tie our damage to the environment to any particular technology. Rather, it should be tied to our inclination toward excess, no?]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/16957#comment17013 Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:33:24 -0400
I do want to comment on your comments about digital pictures. This is a somewhat complicated area. Clearly 800 pictures attached to a Facebook site is excessive. As grist for the mill, I would suggest consideration of another scenario. Earlier this week I was on the roof of a building reviewing equipment with my business partner, a licensed professional engineer. We had limited time, and he went directly to key areas to document what we knew we had to have when we left the site. I clicked dozens of additional digital photographs of all the equipment. This made it feasible to retain information that otherwise we would not have retained. Later it turned out during the data analysis stage of the work that this extra information was essential. It was not that we were stupid about our narrow focus. It was that we focused where we had to focus and also captured as much of the periphery as we could. Why? Because, as anyone knows who has done video documentary, if you are filming in real time, and some key event happens, you often discover that part of that event occurs just outside the camera's frame. Thus, all those seemingly un-necessary photos turned out to be critically important. So the digital camera costs something in storage and battery, but it saves time and travel that would otherwise have been required to return to the site for more data. But then, taking it to the next level, the question is what do we do with all that rich extra data once we have finished using it. I again need to do the numbers, but I suspect that archiving it off onto a CD or DVD, labelling well, and storing the media efficiently goes a long way toward keeping it all as green as possible. Further, we fall even more deeply into agreement when I point out that such digital photographs should not be stored on a Google site simply because Google makes all those GBs of storage available for free.

One key lesson stands out for all of us in our time. We all need to restrain ourselves, even if it seems that we are partaking of unlimited resources. Those resources are not really unlimited. And they do have costs.]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/16957#comment17023 Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:29:04 -0400
Thanks for your insight here. Do you monitor for keywords like "conservation" or "green" or "energy?" I'm wondering how you stumbled upon this post...

The example you cite, where capturing extra images ended up saving time and resources, is a good counterpoint that shows how the increase in storage capability for things like digital pictures can be a valuable tool applied in a variety of contexts. In this case, the conservation might come later, when deciding what files are saved and/or archived. I'd be interested in a more detailed comparison of archiving methods, though I suspect that using CD media would only be a good short term solution. The dyes that most CD-R's use are quite light sensitive and consequently seem to have a very short lifespan. I wouldn't want my only backup of important data to be on CD.

Your concluding comment, about the need for restraint, is really the core of what I was trying to get at with these posts about digital conservation. Thanks again for taking the time to comment,

Chris]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/16957#comment17025 Mon, 06 Apr 2009 07:42:39 -0400
I'm sure you are aware of this but Google started to literally scan books from multiple libraries for their online library. Here is a list of questions and answers pertaining to "the worlds greatest library".

Who knows if one day, we'll walk into the library and just hook our usb/kindle device into a server and download away.]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/16957#comment17279 Mon, 04 May 2009 15:04:46 -0400
Many museums have been working on digitizing their collections for years, and are now bumping into the problems of media fallibility, format fallibility, and storage fallibility. It's practically a full-time job to manage a digital collection, let alone an "analog" one.

For us it's a standards issue, which seems diametrically opposed to the constantly-developing and plastic world of digital representation. (Nobody wants to have to go back and re-photograph 3.5 million objects every 10 years). Any thoughts on the best way to wed these two paradigms?]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/16957#comment17548 Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:07:23 -0400
@Liz, this is a great comment. I ran into similar issues when trying to archive my work as a film student at RISD. Some was in 16mm film, which degrades easily, some sound on magnetic tape, which is still pretty robust, some on DV tape, which is very vulnerable to dust and heat, some on BETA, which is resilient but too obscure, and some on DVD, which succumbs to scratches and light degradation. My best bet would be to get it all on a hard drive, but that's easier said than done at this point. Getting a DV tape or DVD ripped is one thing, but the 16mm film or BETA tape? Needless to say, I still have VHS, BETA, DV, film cans, and DVDs laying around... as if these projects were really worth keeping around!

I've also been thinking along similar lines after hearing a podcast from The Spark radio about dead media and digital preservation, and how archivists have a general concern about how to best store information- both current and old. One shocker from that show was that a guest mentioned that the national archive still does not accept document formats like Microsoft Word documents. If they don't accept that, can you imagine all the information that is not being brought in??

As far as wedding the two paradigms is concerned, I'm really not sure. We're constantly moving forward in terms of better media (bigger/stronger/faster/cheaper), so at the risk of sounding too pessimistic, I imagine that this progress will always be a bane to archivists. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner we get to a format that requires the fewest moving parts, the better... Also, let's ditch the disc as soon as possible. Nothing is more frustrating than renting a DVD and getting the "skipping over damaged area" message and then the next thing you know you're 45 minutes later in the film. Not cool.

Thanks for reading and commenting,

Chris]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/16957#comment17554 Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:03:03 -0400