Comments on: Session Proposal: Permanence and Digital Media Proposal Valerie Clark

By: valerieaclarkny

valerieaclarkny — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:05:51 +0000

Well, thank you. I worked with some 9/11 slides as an intern in 2010, and they were coming loose in their mounts. Even still photos need temperature and humidity control that is not supplied due to expense, The easiest thing is to scan and digitize them, but then hard drives will wear out…
I was hoping to find others concerned with this issue. Maybe there will be standardization of hardware and eventually there will be a little piece of metal in a hard drive that can be swapped out, as books can be re-bound. Cloud computing gets a lot of attention, but there has to be a server somewhere, and servers aren’t forever, either. I was hoping to meet some hardware geeks, because a hardware solution would be nice.
Looking forward to THATCamp.

By: Kathleen Hulser

Kathleen Hulser — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:20:47 +0000

Your thoughts on this are timely. When I worked as public historian at a large NY archive, I was told repeatedly over many years by different officials that time-based media (film, video, digitally based moving images) were not part of collections and could not be because of problems with the format changes and lack of money for continually updating and migration. This of course was slightly ironic, because in fact, items that were time-based media did in fact end up in collections due to the nature of 20th and 21st century events which were being documented. Thus, when September 11th occured, many items on film came into collections, without a real policy on how to deal with the issues you raise. Naturally, for that historical repository like many, if not most archives, the reality had exceeded the institution’s capacity to plan and deal with the media that were arriving on the doorstep. You pose a widespread planning issue that is being wrestled with at different levels, and will not be solved piecemeal at each collecting institution. Glad you are talking about it.

By: Kimon Keramidas

Kimon Keramidas — Sat, 12 May 2012 17:41:35 +0000

Excited that you proposed this Valerie as I am teaching a course on Media and Materiality that addresses some of these questions this fall. Will hope to drop in and participate if I can get some time during the hectic weekend!