What do you think are the greatest challenges for the long-term storage and preservation of media assets?
b. Chosing a storage technology that will not become obsolete in a few years. 39
c. Physical reliability of storage medium. 26
d. Meeting costs of state-of-the-art storage. 18
e. Accessing analog materials once they are in a digital format. 13
Designing an open system that you can exchange parts [...] to take advantage of new/better technologies as they become available.
- Baker
[Physical reliability of storage medium] may be the "greatest" challenge, but [Chosing a storage technology that will not become obsolete in a few years] and [Meeting costs of state-of-the-art storage] are, I think, the ones that will make the most difference over the next century to the greatest amount of material. The solutions to [Finding a climate-controlled, stable storage environment to physically house a collection] and [Accessing analog materials once they are in a digital format] require education/action of individual institutions. - Carli
...developing strategies for migrating records to new technologies as old technologies become obsolete [...] that ensure the critical components of a records content, context, and structure are captured and moved forward through time. - Conrad
...data migration - moving it from today's format to tomorrow's. - Eiteljorg
...hardware to play the formats is the crucial topic. - Gaustad
The challenge is in preparing for technology obsolescence. The library and archive community are beginning to talk about encapsulation of behaviors with "documents" (a document can be a memo or a film) such that the software that created it can be emulated. - Graham
...the existing image data bank in analog form may be "traditional" but I
do not have to worry about changing softwares every few months that make
it impossible for me to retrieve what records/ images I had made last year.
... What happens if the caretaker is removed? - Hehman
...format obsolescence, and the difficulty of managing the migration of data to new environments (especially if establishing preservation standards for the conversion of material from one format to another is required). - Hirtle
Format migration is one solution, but it requires careful planning and is expensive, requires also a flexible storage area design. - Lee
The act of migrating from an old medium or format to a new one for which it was not originally designed. It is precisely that moment of transition when information is in danger of being lost. - Lowe
...convincing administration of the need for long-term storage and preservation of media assets. - McLemore
It is a fact that the rate of physical and chemical deterioration is linked to environmental conditions. If the "native" format can be stabilized through proper storage environment, then (at least in theory) it can be accessed well into the future for the purposes of duplication and format migration. Also, since doing the actual piece by piece reformatting is a costly, time consuming proposition, a good environment is economical since its has a stabilizing effect on all materials in the collection. - Messier
...software systems that manage and access the hardware storage systems [...] are unpredictable, inflexible, buggy, and they change every few years, causing us [...] to be unable to read data even though the hardware storage was stable. - Ogle
...a bigger problem is ensuring continual funding in keeping / maintaining the environment in the storage facility stable. - Phan
Migrating the data as new technologies develop. - Sinclair
The big word here is money. Trained staff and adequate space and time to do the work .... - Skarstad
...getting people to care. - Vanderlinden
...cost of data migration as technology changes. If the technology wave-period can be extended, as UPF seems to offer, the stability of storage media becomes significant, along with the conditions required to make it last the distance. - Webb
If paradigm shift occurs (switch to digital), backward compatability.- Weiss
...convinc[ing] the companies to produce a product for us to purchase and the equipment to do the transfers. - Wilson
The greatest challenge is continuing to provide material to users IN THE FORMAT THEY FIND CONVENIENT AND USEFUL. This implies format conversion. The logistical challenge is performing such conversions in a cost-effective manner. - Wright
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