De-Archiving: Where Is the Money to Deliver Digital Beef?
February 25, 2018
I read “De-Archiving: What Is It and Who’s Doing It?” I don’t want to dig into the logical weeds of the essay. Let’s look at one passage I highlighted.
As the cost of hot storage continues to drop, economics work in favor of taking more and more of their stored material and putting it online. Millions of physical documents, films, recordings, photographs, and historical data are being converted to online digital assets every year. Soon, anything that was worth saving will also be worth putting online. Tomorrow’s warehouse will be a data center filled with spinning disks that safely store any valuable data – even if it has to be converted to a digital format first. “De-archiving” will be a new vocab word for enterprises and individuals everywhere – and everyone will be doing it in the near future.
My hunch is that the thought leader who wrote the phrase “anything that was worth saving will be worth putting online” has not checked out the holdings of the Library of Congress. The American Memory project, on which I worked, represents a miniscule percentage of the non text information the LoC has. Toss in text, boxes of manuscripts, and artifacts (3D imaging and indexing). The amount of money required to convert and index the content might stretch the US budget which seems to wobble around with continuing resolutions.
Big ideas are great. Reality may not be as great. Movies which can disintegrate during conversion? Yeah, right. Easy. Economical.
Stephen E Arnold, February 25, 2018
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