{"id":159,"date":"2009-02-01T22:06:12","date_gmt":"2009-02-02T03:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=159"},"modified":"2009-02-01T22:07:02","modified_gmt":"2009-02-02T03:07:02","slug":"how-to-make-a-digital-archive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=159","title":{"rendered":"How to Make a Digital Archive?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>OK, in the great tradition of <a href=\"http:\/\/jwz.livejournal.com\/\">jwz<\/a>, I must now ask das internets for their opinion on how to proceed on a project.  I&#8217;ve been asking friends for opinions on this, and I&#8217;d like to know what others think.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the backstory.  I&#8217;m now an orphan, which at age 36, is a bit freaky.  I&#8217;m left wondering whether the first 20 years of my life ever happened.  Why?  <i>There&#8217;s no evidence of it left<\/i>.  No more mom or dad, and no more house I grew up in either (it was sold and gut-rehabbed a couple of years ago.)   Was my childhood a hallucination?  Am I a Cylon?<\/p>\n<p>All that remains is three gigantic boxes of photos and documents extending back through most of the 20th century.  They somewhat tell the story of me, my parents, and my grandparents (and a wee bit about my great-grandparents, all eight of whom emigrated to the U.S. around 1900.)  Specifically, I&#8217;ve got:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A bazillion photos (some labeled, some not)<\/li>\n<li>Personal letters, notes, drawings, poems, journals, articles<\/li>\n<li>Bits of video<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My goal is to organize this stuff into something coherent, so that there&#8217;s something I can pass down to my descendants.  I&#8217;d like to create an archive in <b>both<\/b> physical and digital form that will last 100 years.  I&#8217;m imagining that I&#8217;ll scan everything to disk, annotate as much as I can, and then re-print everything on acid-free paper.  I&#8217;ll hand my kids the paper albums and a hard disk, with explicit instructions to re-copy the digital data to new media every 10 years or so.  (With the understanding that media will change constantly &mdash; holographic storage, quantum storage, whatever&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>But my big question is:  what formats do I store data in?  Which file formats will still be comprehensible in 100 years?  <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Paper&#8221;, you say.  Duh, well sure, that&#8217;s why I&#8217;m also printing it all out.  But the digital form will be far more convenient over the next N decades.  I want my descendants to be able to throw this extra terabyte of genealogical data onto their wristwatch&#8230; keep it on their iPod Femto for convenience.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Should I scan photos to jpg or tiff?  The massive size of a tiff file feels ugly to me, but that size difference will be meaningless in 30 years, and maybe the lossless-ness should be what&#8217;s important.  (Imagine people in 1983 arguing about whether to include a 5kb or 50kb file in a time capsule!)<\/li>\n<li>Should documents be scanned to PDF?  Tiff?  PDF seems really convenient in terms of being able to encapsulate a multiple-page document, as opposed to awkwardly dumping each page of the document as a separate tiff file.  But will PDF be readable in 100 years?<\/li>\n<li>Video:  mpeg4?  Which format is the most openly documented, and will still be decodable in the future?<\/li>\n<li>Metadata:  how do I describe every document?  My naive idea is to create an ASCII text file (probably still readable in 100 years!) which lists each file included in the archive by name, and explains the context and signficance of each.  The same document would probably include a basic biography of each family member.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Thoughts and comments are most welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OK, in the great tradition of jwz, I must now ask das internets for their opinion on how to proceed on a project. I&#8217;ve been asking friends for opinions on this, and I&#8217;d like to know what others think. Here&#8217;s the backstory. I&#8217;m now an orphan, which at age 36, is a bit freaky. I&#8217;m [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=159"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":165,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions\/165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}