On Physical Preservation
These absolutely fantastic videos cover 2 major archives being lost:
Records + physical paper also:
- Take up a ton of space
- Are rotting with the passage of time
- And natural disasters (fires, floods, etc.)
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:
- yellowing
- water stains
- torn edges
... and trying to scroll through the Library of Congress's website, it's just awful. You have to:
- Download/View 1 page at a time
- Only available as PDF + "JPEG2000".
- Get awfully, super-compressed images
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:
Originally Posted by haertig
Similarly, the slides I took on our honeymoon are deteriorating. [...] Besides, I don't even know where my slide projector is. Chances are it would need a new bulb (probably unavailable). And additional carousels to hold the slides. I wonder where in the heck my roll down slide screen is?
|
Heh, exactly!
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:
A report created by Library of Congress film historian and archivist David Pierce claims:
- 75% of original silent-era films have perished.
- 14% of the 10,919 silent films released by major studios exist in their original 35 mm or other formats.
- 11% survive only in full-length foreign versions or film formats of lesser image quality.
Of the American sound films made from 1927 to 1950, an estimated half have been lost.
|
And every so often, someone appears with some long-lost versions, sitting in someone's private vault somewhere:
(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:
Hyperlinks
Many of our books have URLs in them. Particularly our adult nonfiction books, which often have endnotes with lots of URLs. And in ebooks, we make these URLs into hyperlinks.
And as we know, URLs can stop working.
The web community has gotten good about talking about this problem, and they call it link rot.
There’s scholarly research on the prevalence of link rot—when URLs stop working—and of reference rot—when the information at a given URL changes from what it was when the author cited it. This study found that more than half of the URLs cited in US Supreme Court decisions suffered from one or the other. Which is not a great thing for the history of American jurisprudence.
[...]
|
For more, also see my discussion back in:
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:
- Search through closed captions + subtitles
- Find exact clips/minutes of any news over the past ~30 years.
- Translate + do all sorts of data analysis on it.
- For example, seeing topics/trends over time—similar to Google Trends—or seeing how many times a specific person appeared or was interviewed (based on visuals/captions on the screen as well).
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.
