[AT] OT: recording vinyl to computer files

[rlgoss at insightbb.com]

Ralph, IMHO, there are different answers to this question depending on which format the original photos are in.  The old studio prints and pre-WWII prints are one thing, transparencies (Kodachrome, Anscochrome, Ektachrome) is something else, and prints from the last 50 years are something else again.
 
RE: the self life of CD's and the use and care of those, there are published guidelines for them from the library archivists associations that speak to that specific problem.  This is one of the reasons that I mention "migrating the media" more than once.
 
I agree that many of the old photos seem to be in very good condition, but they aren't all going to stay like that forever and the duplication of them so that multiple copies are available for viewing in geographically separate locations is often cost prohibitive.  Some quotes are as high as $10 per image.
 
The question about the permanence of an archiving process is causing a great amount of hand-wringing among professional archivists.  Once you start thinking in terms of "making the materials available" instead of "keeping" them, it makes all the difference in the world with regard to what route to follow.  It's the difference between conservation and preservation.  Archivists are literally debating those two concepts, and they haven't come to agreement on which is which (or whether there is a difference).  
 
I have scanned thousands of photo images in all sorts of formats (both positive and negative) in the last few years so I can make them available to relatives, researchers, and interested friends.  The last such project of that nature was the digital and physical archiving of my mother's photo album that I worked over last Thanksgiving vacation.  It consists of nearly 450 prints dating from 1921 to 1928.  Most of them are in good condition -- no obvious evidence of acid damage -- but many of the prints were very faded, had hypo burns on them, were poorly exposed, etc, so the physical archiving (removing them from the original album and mounting them in an acid-free envitonment with chemically inert materials in actual contact with the photos) gave me the opportunity to do high-resolution digital scans of the images at the same time.  Those digital files have been tweaked to eliminate the original errors in processing, and have been put together as a slide show and burned to a CD.  I have sent out better than a dozen copies since mid-December with captions identifying names, dates, locations, occasions, etc.  That's something I couldn't have done with the original album.  Can you imagine spending $4500 for just one copy of all the original photos?
 
Is the current medium of a CD with all the images in JPEG format the end of the archiving?  No.  But it works for here and now, and when migration to a new storage format is necessary, it will only take me a couple of minutes to do it rather than the week and a half of concentrated effort that the first transfer required.
 
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
 
Larry


d that don't appear to have deteriorated at all. 
> I have been 
> scanning a lot of these old photos and documents to cd but 
> sometimes I 
> wonder just how safe and permanent the material on them will be.
> 
> Ralph in Sask.
> 
> 
> 
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