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12-03-2022, 05:46 PM | #16 |
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Ten years ago we moved to a new house. It had a nice dry basement with no hint of any prior flooding events. So we stored dozens of cartons of paper books down there, pending unpacking and shelving. There was an ice storm and some storm drains in the area became blocked. Ten inches of water in the basement for a few hours. A "once in a generation event" said the local paper.
The lifetime of about a thousand paper books: two or three minutes. Right then my ebook collection began to grow like Topsy. Internet Archive aims to gather and save for posterity all the knowledge there is. So why does it base itself in a time and place where that is impossible with all the major publishers and nut cases breathing down their neck? And their attempts to get around that pressure like "one hour loans" are pathetic. And the quality control, at least in the small bit I use is simply terrible. Things scanned in China, twisted, misaligned, pages missing, no checks of any kind. Automated OCR and text formats, including epub, that are simply unreadable. How is this saving information for the future? It is like intentionally screwing it up to provide job security for some future generation of digital archaeologists. In many ways, the shadow libraries do a better job. |
12-03-2022, 06:18 PM | #17 | |
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Yes, exactly. |
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12-03-2022, 06:25 PM | #18 | |
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12-03-2022, 07:22 PM | #19 |
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Yes, I should have been more careful and specified paper, rather than paper books. I highly doubt anyone would have been able to read the Dead Sea Scrolls if they had been stored on a hard drive, rather than paper.
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12-03-2022, 07:45 PM | #20 |
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12-03-2022, 10:01 PM | #21 |
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The Dead Sea Scrolls would be interesting to trace back to their origin. But the hard drive that somebody stored them on? Even more interesting!
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12-03-2022, 10:05 PM | #22 |
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I dunno, books from the 90s aren’t really holding up well unless stored in some great conditions, the pages may have gotten a little dried out, the ink has faded, etc.
Meanwhile I’m reasonably sure I can open a text file from a Mac Classic on my iMac M1 despite the decades of time and OS upgrades between the two. And it would look just as it had back in the 90s. Arguably better because the screen I’m reading on is going to be miles away sharper. |
12-03-2022, 11:33 PM | #23 |
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Moi? A week ago, I finished transferring some old corporate records from IBM EBCDIC 8" single sided single density floppies to a USB drive for a corporate customer. I will admit that was the first time I've used those drives in 6 years and I was very happy that my hand written (more like scribbled) notes attached to the drive case were still readable (not to mention the both the Qume drives still worked). Of the ~80 disks, only 2 had non-recoverable read errors.
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12-03-2022, 11:45 PM | #24 | |
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https://youtu.be/jSNR6EpwKn4 |
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12-04-2022, 02:45 AM | #25 | |||
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On Physical Preservation
These absolutely fantastic videos cover 2 major archives being lost:
Records + physical paper also:
so these also have to constantly be maintained + are getting converted/condensed to other formats. Like microfilm was used for many decades... but even with that, you have to store it somewhere... and, better archival tech can always come along. See: where they linked to early microfilm->digital conversions, then current 2020 microfilm->digital conversions. The quality is so much better with the newer scanning tech. - - - Another example is many old newspapers/magazines converted to microfilm, with the originals destroyed (or rotted away). Like a recent book I've been digitizing referenced a lot of the: You can already see severe:
... and trying to scroll through the Library of Congress's website, it's just awful. You have to:
And you can't easily do text searches or anything... (Not that their OCR is great either...) Side Note: If you want more details, I wrote a bit about newspaper OCR last month in: Yes, the Library of Congress version is "available"—and better than nothing—but it's horrible to actually use + get anything useful out of it! - - - Physical Preservation (Old Photos/Films) + Old Tech Quote:
I think you'll be very interested in this fantastic documentary: which was Keanu Reeves covering the changeover from film -> digital. I wrote about it in a sidenote back in 2013: But like you+DNSB said with your slide projectors/floppies, even the tech to read these some of these formats is rotting away. (See the documentary for many examples of early digital movies/formats being completely unreadable now.) - - - Side Note: And if you love video games + early computer animation/CGI, see: where they discuss how movies like Tron + Terminator were done, but those old computers were running proprietary hardware/software/OSes, it was all custom-made stuff... so it's very hard (or impossible) to even recover those originals. - - - If you like old films, there are also ones completely lost in time too, like: which was actually shot a few weeks after the Titanic sunk, with an actual actress who survived the shipwreck (wearing the same exact clothes)! If you're interested in that type of stuff, check out the: Quote:
(Like lost episodes of "Dr. Who" pop up every few years!) Physical Preservation (Vinyl) In 2021, the Internet Archive also posted this amazing tweet showing how they digitize all these vinyl records: And this 2019 article on their blog about the Boston Library collection:
On Updating/Maintaining Formats Even ebooks need to be maintained... see the fantastic article+speech by Teresa Elsey (an editor at Houghton Mifflin):
Link Rot alone is a serious problem. Every year, a large % of all URLs break: Quote:
On Updating/Maintaining News/Laws + Completely New Interactive/Analysis This year, the Internet Archive's big push was: where they're digitizing tons of government documents, and making them actually usable/searchable. (Right now, a lot of it is buried in physical form somewhere, completely inaccessible to the public.) Another recent project is that they've been digitizing decades of news: Now, you're able to:
This is the kind of stuff the original article was talking about. You have to constantly reprocess the backlog, using a lot of the latest tech, to make the old documents/scans even more findable/searchable/usable. It's not just some static vault—where you lock things away, and maybe 1 person in a decade might even see the dusty tome—there's constantly new/better ways of accessing this data. Last edited by Tex2002ans; 12-04-2022 at 02:58 AM. |
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12-04-2022, 06:47 AM | #26 | |
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Formats and digital storage are not problems. It's DRM that's an issue for ordinary people. There isn't any DRM that can't be defeated by experts even if server is gone. See MS "Plays for sure". Cheap paper doesn't last. The 100+ year old books don't use the paper called Pulp in 1930s. My 100+ year old books better than may 1960s to 1980s. If you want physical print then parchment or better still, clay tablets. |
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12-04-2022, 07:27 AM | #27 | |
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12-04-2022, 09:21 AM | #28 | |
the rook, bossing Never.
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And a backup is only local HW/SW failure, not location failure unless there is an off-site copy. Fire, break-ins, subsidence, flood, lightning, truck/car hitting building, bombs, terror, missiles, earthquakes. Online copies are more about collaboration & sharing than backups. Mirroring isn't too bad now, but RAID5 rebuild time has got so silly that having backup HDDs offline and copying to a reformatted RAID5 is far faster than a rebuild replacing one 6T drive. The last RAID5 I had was ultra-wide & fast 15000 RPM SCSI drives. Certainly under 5G byte each. HW RAID controller with cache DRAM and battery. But really needed active UPS to avoid serious data loss/corruption on power fail. Prior system was Pentium Pro dual CPU with EISA RAID controller and "hot swap" caddies, only 2G Byte 10,000 RPM SCSI. Even in late 1990s I got cross with salesman when he pulled out a caddy on our main server as demo. Took hours to rebuid. OTOH the first NT 4.0 cluster (regualar servers with dual external SCSI ports and SCSI extenders as isolator/auto-termination) we had with two sets of mirrored external drives had no issue with pulling power cord out on one server. It did need 4x UPSes! I gave away my last 8" drive a few years ago, but still have 360K & 1.2M 5.25", both kinds of 3" and 720K and 1.44M 3.5" and one last Mobo with PCI-e and decent CPU with a real floppy port. A USB 3.5" can't read "foreign" formats. Drivers and Emulators for CP/M, DOS, Amstrad PCW and others (not Amiga floppies) on Linux. Some on a much older P4 XP box. Dumped last PCs with ISA and MFM HDD a few years ago. |
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12-04-2022, 09:43 AM | #29 |
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Permanence in a "throw away" society? <shrug>
If one cares, technology can be made more durable; but nobody really cares (except for a few oddballs). Think vintage cars, for example. Yes, digital information needs to be maintained. OTOH, maintenance is usually simple, if one does it in a timely manner. Most of the "horror stories" come from people/organizations who wouldn't bother to do that maintenance until the tech was so old that conversion methods had been scrapped. 8" floppy drive in 2022? Why hadn't they been converted decades ago to 5 1/4" floppies in the 1980's, and those to 3 1/2 (or hard drives) in the 1990's? (and those multiply backed up?) A days work both times. I keep my data in commonly used, open sourced, formats; and in on-site, and off-site, storages. And for the most part, I use it on off line (no internet access) machines. My data is far more valuable that the machines it's used on, or the storage it's stored on. It's DRM that kills data, much more so than obsolescence, |
12-04-2022, 10:49 AM | #30 |
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For decades, libraries discarded and burned old junk that took up their shelves. Now, there is the 'preservation' craze. It's ridiculous.
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