Archiving very old paper diagrams, drawings and text

On a sunny day (Tue, 31 May 2005 17:50:32 +0000 (UTC)) it happened bz wrote in :

So, no backups, he did not really deserve a PhD :-)

On a sunny day (31 May 2005 11:00:21 -0700) it happened snipped-for-privacy@jjdesigns.fsnet.co.uk wrote in :>

Yes, indded it is awfully slow at 400dpi. The GIF patent has expired I think, you are free to use it now. Fax looks pretty horrible to me... Still have to try some 20 Euro bills ;-)

So much for theory. The brief history of digital storage has taught us, however, that digital data has a much shorter life than paper -- either because of physical deterioration of the media, or because the regular transfer to modern media has been neglected.

People are not that disciplined. Important data --both in private households and companies-- will continue to be stowed away in cartons on attics and forgotten about; a process that "analog" media (paper, records, films) are known to survive with no great (but of course some) loss.

The big advantage of "analog" media is that the contents are always human-readable with no or little technical effort, even when they have sustained considerable damage.

This is only a plus if all these copies are continuously maintained -- stored properley, checked frequently for integrity, and re-copied regularly. This just multiplied the time and effort required to keep them around.

To sum it up: Things that need permanent attention just to stay extant aren't going to be around for long. Digital data is one such thing.

Of course.

robert

You can, but chances are you won't. Better xerox all the stuff on good paper, too -- it'll last another couple hundred years. Paper has become much better.

robert

JPEG works surprisingly well on pencil drawings when set to an appropriate level (which may not give a big advantage over PNG after all). Try it.

robert

color levels, like edge preserving smoothing and

visual appearance.

For stuff like this I always use the netpbm suite (available for probably all OSes). Write a shell script once and then process the whole batch at once. If you're more of a visual guy and limited to Mac or Windows, use the batch processing freature of Photoshop.

robert

I dunno. I've got 3 CDs with all my early floppies on them. And a DVD with all 3 CDs on (actually 2, one in a safe place if the house burns down). With the rise of storage media capacity, keeping stuff older than the last generation tends to be almost free.

The arguments are interesting, but essentially nothing will last indefinitely unless you look after it.

There is no magic longer life to analogue media: many historic early films are just turning into crud and it is too late to save them all, it is a race for cash and time to copy the most valuable ones onto new media. Ditto for magnetic tape, 3M made lots of tape that they said would last a certain number of years but didn't. Now they have a big legal fight with people who recorded irreplaceable stuff on tape where the magnetic oxide is coming off. Compensation is difficult, no amount of money can replace some things.

From a practical point of view, it is easier to deal with digital data. Maintaining readable copies is easier and faster and does not introduce analogue transcription errors. And the data files are a lot more convenient for sharing across the web.

I recently saw a software package that can read scanned technical drawings and create CAD files from them. These are much smaller, and better quality than the originals. It is OCR for technical drawings. Various companies use it to convert their old blueprints into a more useful form.

Can't recall the name, but there seem many companies doing this kind of software.

Robert Latest wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@localhost.localdomain:

I think that the records written by the Etruscans are no longer readable.

Without the Rosetta stone, Egyption hyroglyphics would still be unreadable.

Olde English isn't exactly easy to read.

Methinks you overestimate the advantage of analog media.

The problem of transcribing data is much older than the digital age.

--
bz

please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an 
infinite set.

bz+sp@ch100-5.chem.lsu.edu   remove ch100-5 to avoid spam trap

On a sunny day (1 Jun 2005 10:36:50 GMT) it happened Robert Latest wrote in :

apart.

Not exactly, once I had a box of paper stuff that got wet. You could no longer peel the pages apart, total loss. Lots of things attack paper, fungus, woodworm, I have seen snails eat corners from carton boxes.

My DVD+RW were guaranteed for 100 years! (Imation). The newest ones are not. Of cause nothing will play these in a hundreds years. But the old rule of ever more (disk) space applies:

1 GB harddisk, 2, 4, 8, 40, 120 I have about 300 to 400 DVD archive now, some are backups, some are data, some are video. From time to time I check these, and indeed some deteriorate. But most basically I could never have stored so much data in such a small space without these. Almost the whole collection is in one of those portable cases now (no boxes), numbered and indexed into a database, and in case of fire or whatever can just be carried away by one person in a flash. I have been in a situation where MANY people were needed to 'save' tapes from a burning studio. Imagine saving 2000 kilo of papers in 3 minutes or less.

And of cause digital allows you to keep a copy elsewhere (I mentioned uploading to one of these free unlimited accounts). In my view paper is nice, but its time is past. I know people have been saying this for years, but many of us had shelves and whole cupboards full of data books! Now you are online and simply google for the pdf, do not even keep it locally! This server client setup allows a central high quality storage (with all possible sorts protection), while maintaining redundancy (because 4 sure somebody will have a copy). So that is why I am digitizing, and also to make things available to others remotely (put it on the server).

Etruscan inscriptions are quite easy to read; it's just that the language is mostly unknown now. It's more analogous with having a disk that's perfectly sound, but you can't run the program because the OS no longer exists.

Old English is fairly easy to read, by the way. Even if it's not a modern transcription, they had a beautiful clear script, much clearer than mediaeval monkish where everything reduced to parallel strokes, and if you have a smattering of German and a slight knowledge of one or two existing English dialects, the vocabulary isn't too strange either. The grammar and syntax are the hard bit, but not too bad.

A couple of years ago, I bought a book in a second hand bookshop, an Englishman on a tour of the USA in the years immediately before the Civil War. The binding is falling apart, but the whole thing is eminently readable, 150 years after publication. It's better than floppies or CDs or tapes or punched cards, largely because English hasn't been made obsolete by the barbarian at the Gates.

Paul Burke

I know what you mean! 50 years ago I was doing quite a bit with tensors. Subscripts and superscripts with their own subscripts ...

PNG is lossless and quite efficient in 4bit/pixel. I use PMView to convert the scanned image to 16 "colors" for storage as PNGs.

Ted

Indeed. My daughter frequently sends me a scanned page of calculus for my comments and/or solution when her answers disagree with the text. These 4bit/pixel PNGs run from ~50KB to ~200KB. At 100KB/page a DVD holds close on 5,000 pages and that will quickly quadruple when double sided, double layer price drops.

Ted

So you're comparing media that survived thousands of years with those that won't last ten to support the case for the latter?

True.

robert

GIF is better; gives a smaller file size with zero loss. Now if you do not give a crap about quality, then JPEG with high compression will beat GIF.