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Imagine with me, for a few moments
at least, that you are still young and will soon celebrate your
tenth birthday. In this imaginary scenario, for the last several
years, you have been living in a small town in Kansas -- maybe a
bit like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. The time is in the early fifth
decade of the last century. With the strong encouragement of your
parents, you have been taking piano lessons for a few years and
are showing some modest talent for this activity. Recently your
mother has begun to have visions of you someday performing as a
concert pianist.
In order to capture your promising musical accomplishments,
your parents have made an appointment with the local studio, which
also happens to be the one and only local radio station, for a recording
session. You observe the grand piano sitting in the middle of an
otherwise bare room, with ominous-looking egg-crate-like sound-absorbing
material covering all the walls and ceiling. This recording studio
is enough to intimidate most adults, let alone the typical ten-year
old. A few practice runs through your prepared ten-minute program
produces some decent passages but also plenty of wrong notes. The
recording engineer informs you that the performance should be as
mistake-free as possible because there will be only one opportunity
to do the recording. You think to yourself, "that's easy for you
to say," as your stress level and stage fright climb to new highs.
All the while your mother is giving you words of encouragement but
also contributing to the growing intensity of the experience by
trying to reassure you how well you are going to do. "Sure Mom,
but just what makes you think that?" are more words left unspoken.
Finally, you can't stall any longer, and the recording engineer
tells you to prepare for his cue. He walks over to a piece of equipment
that looks like an overgrown and very sturdy phonograph and places
a new shiny black platter on it. The machine begins to spin the
platter, an arm descends, the cue is given, and you begin to play.
Meanwhile, the black platter continues its spinning and the "needle"
generates a growing blob of a black string-like substance as the
piano music is translated into tiny wiggly patterns in the spiral
groove being cut into the black plastic. With great concentration,
you make it through your program with only one small bobble. Your
mother smiles and gives you a big hug. You have just participated
in the marvel of creating your very own 78 rpm recording.
And yes, some 40 plus years later, I still have that recording
and when properly encouraged will get it out for you and play it.
That moment of my life has been captured and can be expected to
be "archival" for many years yet to come.
While, in this nostalgic frame of mind, I took a look at
our family's photo album, which by now contains photos representing
all the decades the 20th century. The earliest photos were from
a time when my parents were younger than I was during my traumatic
piano recording experience. These early photos were of course monochromatic,
but the images continue to be as perfect today as the day they were
created. The large-format negatives that, like the photos, have
survived wars, refugee trains, ocean journeys, and the harshest
of storage conditions, also show no noticeable degradation. Over
the years, I have printed duplicates from them with perfect results.
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As I scanned through these earlier decades of family history,
I thought about all the events and challenges. These images were
indeed powerful memory joggers. I was glad that my parents had taken
the effort to carry these images with them through so many years.
I found my own initial photo-appearance in this album in
the eventful fourth decade of the century. Most of these early photos
were also monochromatic.
The first color photos appear in the 50s. And how unfortunate
that is. The images have almost disappeared and what little remains
is an ugly orange color. The introduction of color was highly touted
as the next generation of photography, and was heavily promoted
through advertising as the way to capture precious memories. However,
the color film and paper makers didn't bother to let people know
that their "memories" were only good for maybe a ten-year period
before the images would virtually disappear. Those folks that stuck
with the older Kodachrome slide-film process ended up with the longest-lasting
results. But even today, none of the color imaging materials equals
the archival qualities of monochrome films and papers.
During the last two decades, there has been somewhat more
attention devoted to the archival capabilities of color films and
print materials. Cibachrome papers were the first, to my knowledge,
to produce archival images that could be expected to last more than
50 years under normal storage and display conditions. Some of the
Fuji films and papers have also recently demonstrated good archival
qualities. With care one can expect images made with these films
and papers to degrade less than 10 percent over periods of about
five decades. Thus, it may just be possible to show the images you
made of your year-2000 New Year's eve celebration party at the one
you will attend 100 years from now.
However, suppose you used a digital camera? What will you
have to show and how will you show it? How about in a shorter time
-- say 50 years from now?
We were recently visiting with our new son-in-law, who does
web-site design for a living and is thoroughly steeped in the latest
computer technology. He was showing us the pictures they had taken
during their honeymoon. While the photos had been taken with conventional
35-mm film, each roll had been put onto a CD for convenient computer
viewing. His off-hand comment was, "I wanted to get them put onto
a CD so I never have to worry about them degrading." That seemed
like a reasonable comment. There is no reported information, at
least that I have seen, indicating that the materials from which
CDs are made are going to disintegrate in ten or twenty years --
unlike some of the early movie films. However, what assurances do
we have that the CD materials will last 50 or 100 years and that
we, or our children, will have a way to view these images five or
more decades from now? An actual photo or negative I can always
examine. But what can I do with a CD if in the year 2049 there are
no players that match the year 1999 standards?
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In the last two decades, we have gone from 5 1/4 inch disks,
to 3 1/2 inch disks, to CD-ROM, and to various "memory sticks" that
are used as semi-temporary storage for the newly emerging digital
cameras. What will be the next generation of storage devices? It
is clear that there will be a next generation because what we have
today in insufficient for the 2-megapixel cameras that will be the
mainstream image-capture devices during the first decade of this
millennium. For example, a recent article comparing two of these
cameras noted that in their highest-resolution mode the "memory
stick" could hold only one image. This is clearly not a practical
way to capture high-quality images. And if you put them onto a hard
disk, zip-drive, or CD-ROM, will you have a way to access these
media after another three or four decades of computer-technology
evolution? Perhaps there is much money to be made creating businesses
that do nothing but convert digital information stored in older
formats into those storage media currently in vogue.
By the way, do you have any idea of the archival storage
capabilities of the color ink-jet printer sitting next to your computer?
Well, it's not quite as bad as some of the earliest color negative
films and photographs, but it's not very good either. Current ink
jet printers are most definitely not suited for the printing of
archival images.
It seems that we have made considerably more progress in
the last century meeting our needs for "instant gratification" than
we have for meeting our needs for predictable long-term information
retention. Apparently, the world of bits and atoms is not nearly
as easy to distinguish as some well-known prognosticators would
have us believe. Without the atoms, there is no place to put the
bits. And once we associate the bits with atoms, they seem to want
to wander off on us. The business of information retention will,
I think, be a growing one. The more information we have and the
more we need to access it, with whatever is the latest computer
technology, the more there will be a need for updating storage methods
and devices.
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Perhaps for those of us who cannot make a full-time occupation
of updating our data bases, we can hope that the CD will be around
for some time to come. It seems like the best hope. It is already
the medium-of-choice for audio. It has quickly become the medium-of-choice
for software programs and technical information. It is now becoming
the medium-of-choice for video entertainment. It can be the near-ideal
medium for photographs as soon as permanent write capability becomes
inexpensive. Perhaps with this broad applications base, it will
be the standard medium for some decades to come. For the sake of
holding on to our most precious memories and even our personal data
bases, it is imperative that we have an archival storage technology
that will hold still for more than a few years.
Are we there yet? If not, when? Let me know what you think.
You can reach me by e-mail at
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by phone at 425-557-8850, by FAX at 425-557-8983 and by the always-memorable
post office at 22513 SE 47th Place, Sammamish, WA 98075. Close this window |