Well, the reason that I didn't post anything this morning was that I was late for the reconciliaction meeting, and, in addition, had to respond to an important message from one of the volunteer organizations with which which I am working.
It was interesting to go to the reconciliaction meeting today. The meeting started out with some discussion of the churches in town, and attempts, by this particular population, to attend them. One particular church, which was quite identifiable by its address, was seen as closed, and unwelcoming, even back in those days. It is interesting that so little has changed in the intervening fifty years.
An additional point of interest was the extensive mention, and discussion, of grief, in this week's session, by various participants. This was particularly interesting in view of the non-attendance by someone who had made a big deal about the importance of attendance, and so it was too bad.
The most interesting part, though, was in relation to a project by the speaker. T and D were, at lunch, in extended discussion about archival materials, and the importance of the retrieval of archival materials, in particular video tapes and pictures. T mentioned an extensive collection of video, and, of course, my attention was fixed when he mentioned Betamax. D was talking about retrieving both video and still images, and the difficulties she was having with the archives of various organizations. However, the discussion of what she was actually doing with the still images, in terms of enlarging and enhancing, and retrieving identifiable images so that faces could be recognized in large group photographs, fixed my interest again, since I do know a little bit about the loss of detail involved in transferring from images themselves into digital format, and in terms of the different digital formats for still images.
The problems of archiving of materials, and the possible loss, to history, of a variety of files and sources from what may, in the future, be ironically referred to as the "information age," is not a new one. Many people have noted that there is both irony, and problem, in the fact that our information age, while it is creating content much more quickly, and making it available much more widely, then at any period before in history, the storage of this information is not being attended to in any meaningful way. There are two particular problems in this regard.
The first problem is the actual physical storage of devices. First there were punch cards. Then there were tapes. Then there were different formats of tapes. And, in that regard, there were even differences in the most basic formats of the tapes: most tapes were magnetic tapes, but there was a period of using actual film images with microscope dots storing the data on reels of film tapes. (Then there was the period of computer drums, but those probably aren't much of an issue since they were really only ever used for short-term high-speed storage for actual processing of data, and not long-term data storage.) But then came computer disks, and, particularly, the floppy disks. There were twelve inch discs. There were eight inch disks. There were five and a quarter inch disks. There were three and a half inch disks. Then there were cds, and DVDs. (We actually don't know how long these will last.) And now, mostly people don't store any data locally at all. But if they do, it's probably on USB sticks, also called thumb drives or jump drives or SSDs (Solid State Drives).
Now I've mentioned how long CDs and DVDs will last. Probably the longest lasting of any of these media are the punch cards. But, these days, where can you find a punch card reader? They just don't exist anymore. Even if you could find one, you probably wouldn't be able to find someone who knew how to keep it fixed, maintained, and in working order. So, anything that was in long-term storage on punch cards is probably lost. Then we go to the magnetic tapes. A friend of mine had some nine track tapes, quite a collection of them. He did, a few years ago, run them through a tape drive, and retrieve the data. He could successfully retrieve the data. Once. Because, while he was doing the data retrieval, as the tapes were going through the tape drive, the magnetic media was delaminating from the actual Mylar tape. So, if you have anything stored on magnetic tapes, it may be possible, if you do have access to a tape drive, to actually retrieve that data. But, as I say, you had better be ready to do the data retrieval in one pass, because you aren't going to get a second chance. The situation with floppy drives is probably even more fraught. Floppy discs are constructed in the same way as magnetic tapes, and so the situation of delamination probably does exist. However, in addition, you don't read floppy drives by passing over it it over a reed head once, and once only, but you put it into a drive, where it is spun, at high speed, and so you may not even get a chance to read it the first time, if, in fact, the magnetic media delaminates off the mylar substrate, even before the material is actually read.
CDs and DVDs should last a longer time. The operative word there being "should." We really do not know, with regard to CDs and DVDs, how long these entities do last in a readable state. It could be 100 years. It could be 10 years. We simply don't know. The technology has not been around long enough for us to understand what may happen over long periods of time. Maybe we'll get lucky. (Have we ever been lucky with regard to archival material?) In any case, there are many factors that can ensure that the lifetime of a DVD or CD is much shorter than we actually think. For example, how do you label your CDs and DVDs? Well, maybe you bought the fancy labels that fit on to them, and label them that way. That was probably a good idea. But a number of people will have labeled their CDs and DVDs simply with a Sharpie marker, particularly if it was just an archival backup copy that you wanted to keep around, but never expected to use. Nobody ever expects to use archival backup copies, and that's why they are so seldom tested, and that is why so many people are disappointed when they go to retrieve a backup and find that they don't, actually, have one. In any case if you have labeled your CD or DVD with a Sharpie marker, one of the components in the ink in Sharpie markers will, actually, penetrate the plastic substrate (which on a CD or DVD is actually more of a superstrate, and is on the outside), and, over a period of six months, penetrate down to the metallic layer which is deformed or dimpled in order to store the data. At which point, this particular component of the ink will, in fact, start oxidizing that data storing layer. So, if you have labeled your CDs or DVDs with a sharpie marker, the actual period of time during which the CD or DVD is usable is probably about six months.
And, of course, all of these various technologies rely upon being able to find a device that will actually read punch cards, tape reels, floppy drives, or CDs and DVDs. These devices are becoming increasingly uncommon. It is very hard to find them. And, therefore, reading such archival materials is becoming increasingly difficult.
Then there is an additional problem. The data format in which a file of information is stored. The nice thing about computer standards is that there are so many of them. So, what is your video file, audio file, picture file, or data file stored in in terms of the data format? I tend to store pretty much anything that's important, simply in text. Partly that is because, as somebody who grew up, on the Internet, with email, I like to keep things simple. I don't need any fancy formatting. If I want to indicate that something is to be emphasized, I don't use bold, or italics, or anything that requires any extension of a basic font. I'll just put an asterisk at the beginning and end of the word or phrase that I want to emphasize. Everything is stored in text. Text can be read by anyone. Except that these days, nobody knows how to read text anymore, so if you send them a text file, they can't read it. Argh.
But for anything else, you need a specific data file format. And data file formats go in and out of favour. And if they go out of favour, they are probably never going to come back into favour again, and they are going to be obsolete. So, if you have any data file in an old data format, you probably aren't going to be able to find any program to read it. That is going to mean that your data is lost anyways, even if your physical format is, somehow, still readable. If your data is in a format that is no longer used by any particularly popular program, it's unlikely that you're going to have a program that is old enough to read those old data formats. So, your data is lost anyways. Once again.
Allow me to provide some personal experience. When Gloria died, we had to do a memorial service for her. (Well, we *wanted* to do a memorial service for her.) And, in planning the service, when we came to think about what we wanted in terms of special music, the girls, of course, immediately thought gee, it's too bad that Mum couldn't sing at her own service. Well, since Gloria was a singer, and a soloist, and since I drove her around to all of the events that she sang at, once I got a video camera I did, on occasion, record Gloria singing. When I could catch her unaware. Mostly while she was practicing, so an awful lot of the clips that I have of her singing are somewhat incomplete, or interrupted by having to go back over a section or decide what to do in a particular place in the music. But, yes, I do have several hours of videotape of Gloria singing. But, when I originally copied it off the camera, and onto a format for us to view, it was, originally, in VHS. And, as it happened, with various and sundry situations in the family, I dropped out of first place, in terms of being the family videographer, many years ago. So, I didn't really get to the point of transferring from VHS to DVD.
I had, in fact, purchased a combination VHS and DVD recorder. For exactly this reason. So that I could convert the VHS tapes to DVDs. And, in fact, I had already started the project before video became a rather less important project than doing caregiving for Gloria. But, shortly after I started the project the Toshiba device that I was using suddenly quit. At least the VHS side quit. So I bought another Toshiba combination VHS and DVD recorder. But, by this time other requirements had taken over and I never did get around to continuing the conversion project. And, only a few VHS tapes had been converted, and none of them were the compilation tapes of Gloria singing.
And, of course, while I still had the Toshiba combination VHS and DVD player when Gloria died, and we had been using it to view DVD movies for a number of years, the first time, after Gloria died, when I went to test it out and convert one of the VHS tapes to DVD so that we could decide what we wanted to have in terms of Gloria singing at her own memorial service, of course, the VHS side of the Toshiba player recorder had, once again, given up the ghost. This can be taken as a review of the reliability of Toshiba equipment if you like.
In any case, I was now searching, once again, for a combination VHS/DVD recorder. Or, even a standalone VHS player. At which point I discovered that none of the manufacturers of video equipment even *make* VHS players anymore. You can, of course, buy used VHS equipment. But you're taking your chance in terms of whether or not the player will, actually, play anything. I did buy a guaranteed new VHS player, from a firm called Trusty Electronics, from Texas, for a rather exorbitant price. When it arrived, it would not play anything. And when I contacted Trusty Electronics in order to complain about this situation, they had so thoroughly gone out of business that their Website didn't even exist anymore.
I did go to a source that promised to convert VHS tapes. I provided three VHS tapes, and had them converted. They did all convert, although 1) they were converted to a computer file, which I then had to find a video editor for, and 2) the quality of sound on a couple of the conversions was disappointing to say the least. And, in addition, I later found out that, in the conversion process, one of the tapes had been completely overwritten, so there was no possibility of recovering that material, ever again.
I did, in the end, get a used, but still working, VHS player from a friend. I converted my tapes as quickly as possible, onto DVDs on the, still working, DVD side of the Toshiba recorder. However, I am now being informed by various and sundry parties, that DVDs are *also* going out of style. Therefore, I will need to find some way of converting the DVDs to some more current, more readable, and more accessible version of video files. However, I am sure that, at some point in the future, which may be sooner than anyone thinks, that I will, once again, have to find some way of converting those computer video files, to a new format of computer video files. This will probably continue to happen, at regular time periods, forever. And, this is a situation that faces anyone, who has any kind of archival materials these days.
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