Moving from one type of storage media to another is only the tip of the
iceberg.
But to return to the point at hand, instead of complaining because we
can't have everything, we should, at the very least, thank the library
for giving us more than we had in a cost effective manner.
Barbara Vines Little, CG
Dominion Research Services
PO Box 1273
Orange, VA 22960
540-832-3473
[log in to unmask]
CG, Certified Genealogist, is a service mark of the Board for Certification of Genealogists, used under
license by board certified genealogists after periodic evaluation, and the board name is registered in the
US Patent & Trademark Office.
Vejnar Robert J. wrote:
> Again, Mr. Browning, for some strange reason, refuses to listen to what
> (or read) what the professionals in the field have determined. I find
> this both humorous and insulting. I did not spend years in graduate
> school and years in the profession to be lectured by non-professionals
> on how best to preserve materials.
>
> I have not come across many archivists - because we have no professional
> training in it - who would dare think they knew enough to instruct
> professional archaeologists on how to dig in the dirt. If the
> archivists will refrain from trying to instruct archaeologists on how to
> do their work then I would hope the archaeologists would refrain from
> trying to instruct the archivists on how to do theirs.
>
> And no, if it's electronic, it is NOT necessarily migratable.
>
> Robert Vejnar
>
> Archivist
> Emory & Henry College Archives
> Holston Conference Archives
> P.O. Box 948
> Emory, Virginia 24327-0948
> 276-944-6668 - office
> 276-944-4592 - fax
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Lyle E. Browning
> Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2008 11:20 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Despondent
>
> I've not completely been working in isolation for the last 25 years.
> If I with all my myriad computers can do it, then there is absolutely
> no reason why folks who do this for a living cannot do the same.
> Arguing about how many electrons fit on the head of an electronic pin
> (which "standard" is to be the one true benchmark of 100 years e-
> standard) brings to mind the comment McGuffey had about a "gourd full
> of gnats."
>
> Having gone through this discussion umpteen times on this and other
> lists over the years, I have visited the various archivist websites
> mentioned and what stands out is that the situation is analogous to
> the war of the various computer systems competing for dominance in the
> infancy of computers. And I still see that the thinking is dominated
> by folks with a paper-based mentality rather than forward looking to
> electronic solutions. Sure, if one sticks a 3.5" floppy on a shelf and
> expects to read it 10 years later, one is absolutely pig-ignorant of
> the media and gets exactly nothing unless one is very, very lucky. But
> if you see it as migratable media and go back over it, one has useful
> data.
>
> Text based files, databases and the like aren't a particular problem.
> Image files aren't a problem. In my world, CAD drawings that are put
> into anything other than CAD go "flat" and have to be re-drawn if
> needed for research. That's a problem. My simplistic solution is to
> migrate my own files from the last 20 years into the next generation
> or system of software and to keep them up to date. Surely if I can do
> it, it can be done anywhere. At the macro level, there are programs
> that do batch conversions now of image types.
>
> And at the risk of accusation of putting forth a "just-so" story: I
> have also witnessed the migration of the archaeological and
> architectural history records data from the Department of Historic
> Resources from their refusal in the early 1980's to embrace electronic
> media to going with what was called IPS (Integrated Preservation
> Software by the developer and Incredibly Persnickety Software by the
> users) to the current imperfect but getting better DSS (Data Sharing
> System?). IPS had an intentional bug in it whereby data migrated from
> one field to the next unless the developer was there to "fix" it in a
> timely fashion. When that was no longer possible, it took a while to
> get it sorted out. But it did happen and those folks had no money but
> the will to make it happen. It may not yet be perfect but it was
> migrated from the old system to the new. The folks at DHR aren't
> sitting around waiting for Godot, but rather are dealing with their
> data and when a unified system comes along, it will undoubtedly be
> moved across to it. In the meantime, research is better than it was by
> a long shot.
>
> After all, when it's electronic, it is migratable.
>
> Lyle Browning
>
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