With the increasing pace of media change print offers longevity benefits that are not found elsewhere, says Chris Heric. I have been cleaning out my office at home (spring cleaning if you will, here in North America). This includes my computer, which over time accumulates an incredible array of files, some trivial and some important. I used to joke to my apartment mates (20 years ago, when I got my first Macintosh) that, “Some day, you will not have a disc to put into your computer, it will just have enough capacity to keep everything you would ever need.” That prediction would have well-held water, if computers did not offer an ever-increasing realm of capabilities and roles.
The end result of this though is that I have a roomful of discs that are of every type of media and technology available. Here is a short list of what I found lying around in my office. DDS I, II, III, IV DAT tapes, 8mm Exabyte Tapes, 9-Track linear tapes, DLT Tapes, AIT Tapes, 5.25” MO cartridges (650 mb’s, 1.2 Gigs, 5.2 gigs… all incompatible), 45 MB SyQuest carts, 88 MB SyQuest carts and 100 Mb SyQuest, 3.5” SyQuest, 100 MB Zip carts, 250 MB Zip Carts, thousands of CD’s and hundred of HD floppy discs (Not counting my dead Bernoulli Drive, or my Python Tape Drive).
The further issue to all of that storage however is a two-sided problem. Longevity, and capacity are the two real factors that most people need to keep in mind when they begin moving their lives, and their publications onto their computers. Longevity itself can be split into two sub-categories, obsolescence and lifetime. Obsolescence is the insidious one.
A few months ago, I was contacted by a long-time colleague, who was asking me if I could still read a 5.25” Optical Disc Cartridge. For those unfamiliar with this technology, it is termed more technically as Magneto-Optical technology, and it results in a 5.25” cartridge that stored data in a re-writable optical format. In the Old Days… ten years ago… MO drives were the standard in our industry. CD’s were still expensive, and not cost effective as re-writable data storage devices. So, here I am, in my office, and I have probably 15 different types of proprietary media, none of them compatible with each other, or their precursors. Some of these devices, are barely 7 years old, and they are already obsolete.
Data-Migration, and it’s ever-increasing importance. The end result of my friend calling me and asking if I could read his 5.25” optical cart, was that he wanted me to translate it into a medium that could be better archived. (ie: CD-R.) He wanted me to migrate the data from one electronic format to another. While this is the obvious choice, and makes complete sense, it also poses the question, “When it is electronic, and requires a specific machine and device to read it, is it really archived?” This is a valid question, as a non human interpretable format for data storage is almost without question, except for one. Print.
As I have illustrated in the past in this column, the more electronic the means, and the more technical, the shorter the lifetime of it’s usable format. The more mundane the medium, the longer the lifetime. This is ever more important in that there is no longer an analogue to fall back on in many different types of media.
Take print. In the print world, once it is printed on decent paper, it is archived for hundreds of years. Provided that the substrate lasts, and the language is still spoken by someone, an idea recoded on paper is truly archived for the foreseeable future. As we move further up the tech scale, the lifetime of recorded information decreases. The most modern formats of data storage, having a physical lifetime estimate of the media as hundreds of years, but the computer, the operating system, the file format, and the documents themselves, are only as valuable as the computer or drive able to read them. This could have far-ranging implications as to how to plan for archive… not for the short-term, but I am thinking the long-term.
Computers (well, personal computers) have only been around for 25 years or so. In that timeframe, we have managed to work towards digitising our lives. Now that digital cameras have taken off so much, that archive of priceless photos has been relegated to a sea of 1’s and 0’s, with no analog counterpart. If you lose your computer hard-drive, you could lose all of your photos of your children, or your brother’s wedding pictures etc. You get the picture. When taking traditional film photographs, and scanning them into the computer, sure, you are digitising the information, but there is an analogue equivalent… the original negative or transparency.
The same can be said for a print archive. While it may seem like a backwards-step, to print electronic documents as an archive, it is a very, very stable medium for archive. While it may seem like putting the toothpaste back into the tube to re-digitise already printed textual material, should you absolutely have to have that information, the printed material would be very valuable.
So, to my clients whom have asked me, “What is the best medium to archive my files as?” and have looked at me as though I was daft when I say “Print-them”, there is a reason for this. That printout will long outlive us, and our computers. While it may be a time-intensive task to re-digitise it into a format that is computer interpretable in the future, the fact that it exists in pure analogue text, and graphics, means an ever-greater long-term solution. I have been involved in several projects in re-purposing print material. In nearly every case, taking existing printed material and keystroking it or digitising it was more effective than attempts at reading legacy Scitex or Crosfield assembly files. The most dependable means with which to restore 150 years of magazine editorial content was hands-down the print analog.
Some examples that illustrate my point: Can you find a way to play 8-track tapes, 78 RPM or 12” LPs, or even cassettes? Most people have moved onto new media, and new devices, and relegated their collection to an attic or garage. Print is showing its value far beyond that of the means to distribute information, it can also be looked at as a means to archive it. Publication printers, and publishers beware: long-term archive is not necessarily always a technical term. Print spans lifetimes of obsolescence, and it’s tactile output medium is unbeatable should the unthinkable happen, and your computer or server should crash.
Print… It is not just for communication anymore.
