[AT] Spam> Re: OT--taped audio to CD audio??

[David Bruce]

Larry,

Digital archiving 101 might be off topic but I'm listening.

I have already moved to archiving much of my monthly correspondence 
(bills, receipts, etc) to digital form for ease of retrieval.

David
NW NC

Larry Goss wrote:
> BTW folks, just as a philosophical concept that all of us are going to find ourselves working with, we all need to become adept at media migration to convert analog to digital for everything under the sun.  Audio is just one of those conversions.  Video (both electronic and film) and still images for either photos or documents are two others.  It's the "only" way we have of preserving the history we are involved with regardless of whether it pertains to tractors, literature, photos, events, or what have you.  Converting from analog of any medium is just one of the steps.  Because of the nature of changing technology, conversion from one digital medium to another is going to be with us forever.
> 
> CD's are already passe as an acceptable medium for preserving these materials.  DVD formats are rapidly pushing all other CD formats aside.  PDF as a specialized format for digital preservation of documents shows promise that it may be around for a while.
> 
> You can point a finger of blame about how poor some of the fidelity is on some of the conversions, but you can't add meaningful fidelity to materials that are already in "resolutions" that are pitifully low in the first place.  So when you need to preserve your old home movies or your faded color snapshots, it becomes a bit nitpicking to criticize the fidelity in the commercial Windows products.  For many media conversions, there are optimal resolutions or fidelities that are actually much lower than what is physically possible.  Those lower resolutions work very well for archival work.
> 
> For PDF files of printed or typed documents, the optimal resolution is "around 400 dpi".  Adobe recommends that resolution in their Acrobat products because the optical character recognition engine works with the predefined lettering fonts of the software better at that resolution than at higher or lower scanning densities.
> 
> Enough already!!  I have to quit before this email turns into Digital Archiving 101.
> 
> Larry