A paperless society? I'll just shoot myself now. What about keeping the information around for prosteriety? Forget it.

We are now seeing the sunsetting of the first generation of magnetic media, the floppy disk. Floppies had a pretty good run of about 20 years, but floppy drives are increasingly rare on modern machines, and that's just taking into account 3.5" floppies. A 5.25" floppy drive is already a tough-to-find piece of special equipment. And floppies were ubiquitous - I've little hope of ever seeing again the things I stored on those old SyQuest 44MB cartridges.

Failing definite answers, all we have are guidelines. It's probably a good idea to forget about "posterity" - what you're really doing is archiving for yourself 10 or 15 years down the road when you'll need to migrate the data again to a newer media and/or format, if you want to keep it accessible. Personally, I'd prefer a public domain or at least multi-vendor format over a proprietary one. Also, make multiple duplicate copies to hedge your bet against media failure.

Or you could always transfer the video to film. It's the only format with a proven lifespan of over a century.

What ever I did on the computer in 1991 was never updated through all those years and is now permanently lost EXCEPT that it was on paper first and I STILL HAVE THE PAPER!!!
If you don't have the will to keep going to the next media then don't expect it to keep going after you die.

This world is going to loose a lot work.

Karen Ellis

See

PRESERVATION

Preservation of materials and microfilming to preserve materials is a very important area of library science.

UPF Home This site disseminates information about the proposed Universal Preservation Format for the archiving of media assets.