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From: "Lesley Robertson" <>
Subject: Re: Keeping track of paper files
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:45:52 +0200
References: <bi9v461d9dmf68ffou43tb53e2uj70lp6r@4ax.com><jsq3569dh8fd6824t67ve8jphtt223n8bs@4ax.com><i2t1q4$8i8$2@news.eternal-september.org><e294565bi6hk66go38i5cdces0stqm7782@4ax.com><i2tdnn$m1r$1@news.eternal-september.org><b1f4569sb45bq2onl9icp4rosa7g9qmafl@4ax.com>


"Canth" <> wrote in message
news:...
>
> A hundred years from now, all your cds will be so much waste, but your
> paper records, no matter how poorly filed, will still be usable data.
>

Especially if you're careful with the ink you use. I look after a small
museum and it's noteworthy that laboratory journals going back to the 1880s
are still legible even though checp school exercise books were use, because
the researcher wrote in pencil. The paper was darkening, despite being
stored in the cool dark, but that has now been corrected buy a
neutralisation process. On the other hand, some correspondence, using better
quality paper, is deteriorating because acid inks were used. In order to
read a few letters, I recently put the paper lace that they've become onto a
scanner with dark paper behind it, and was then able to read the text
represented by the holes.

We have 8 inch floppies (and I can't remember how long it is since I saw a
drive for them), and 5 inch floppies (we have one useable drive). CDs used
10 years ago are no longer readable. Anything we want to keep in digital
form is now kept on external hard drives (more than one and from different
manufacturers) and what is claimed to be archival DVDs (again more than one
and from diffeent makers). The really important stuff (eg those lab
journals) is on b/w archival 35 mm film which has a proven track record. I
have a copy of the set of films, but the orginals are in the
climate-controlled, waterproof stores of the Dutch Royal Library. Material
that was put onto microfiche when they first appeared has also survived
well.

It is noteworthy that the material that has survived best since the 1880s is
all on glass negatives. Many have been pretty badly treated some were found
loose in an old crdboard box after a storage reorganisation, but we've even
been able to scan the broken ones. Many have oxidized a bit, but that just
gives a bit of a blue cast, and some have that archival nightmare,
fingerprints (human sweat is acid, it marks everything), but the quality of
the pictures is still so good that we can enlarge them to A0!

Lastly, it's often said that somone, somewhere will preserve a drive and
there will always be an expert around who knows how to handle it. Maybe so,
but if there's only one or even two around, is anyone going to be willing to
use such scarse resources to read an individual's personal family history
files?

Lesley Robertson


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