It is with a heavy heart that I watch The Trumpeter of Jamestowne sail into the sunset, hopefully to return, in the best tradition of "Brigadoon",  in 2107 It was a wonderful experience for me, and I thank many of you out there for passing along info to me.  

- I made a dozen or so appearances as The Trumpeter, wielding my reproduction 1632 trumpet and my plastic armor

- My March has been given to over 100 bands and orchestras -- as far away as Spain and Krakow, Poland, and as such has probably been performed and heard by more people than any other composition written specifically for the 2007 Jamestowne Gala

- The Jamestown Jubilee CD has reached nearly 1000 sales, a pretty amazing feat for a classical/historical CD which by its very nature does not include gyrating torsos and off-color lyrics

But time moves on.  And as luck would have it, last August VA-HIST itself pointed the way for me.  My wife and I have decided to tackle over 100 years of family photographs, such that they can be preserved, shared and celebrated.  I thought I was pretty technically savvy on things like JPGs and PDFs, but the last month has been eye opening.  It goes to the very heart of preserving our history, yet I have seen nothing on VA-HIST about any of it.  So the purpose of this EMail is twofold -  one to let you know what I have found out in the hope that it may be helpful, and two, to solicit in ideas that you may have.

Photographs - For the past 15-20 years, I have worked with digital photos -- mostly JPG files of the images.  So imagine the shock (most pleasant) when I learned last week that the ostensibly JPG image files can also carry captions and tags which can be searched.  Ah, C'mon.... you are fooling me.  I was pointed toward Google "Picasa" and created a supposedly captioned file from an old file.   The file sizes did not look different and the file date field was the same (original) for both.  But I called upon my trusty 1990 QBASIC, wrote a little program to look at the first several hundered bytes.  AND THERE WAS MY CAPTION in that ostensibly old JPG file!!!!!!  Maybe you readers knew about this all along.  But if not, this looks to me like a whole new world of preserving and sharing photos.

Preserving - Having been rejected on another preservation effort by almost every learned institution that I wrote in Virginia and West Virginia, I stumbled across something called MetaArchive, which appears to do exactly what I want to do in preserving, sharing and celebrating family heritage -- particuarly since they use the phrase "Southern Digital Culture."  It looks like a consortium of Ga Tech, Emory University, Virginia Tech and maybe a couple others.  And it is HQ in Atlanta, on Peachtree street, of course :))  The website looks great, but I have not been able to get any response from anybody.  Maybe it is just an idea..... or a blog......  They apparently had a conference last May, but I can find no papers or anything else about that conference.  All in all,  I recall the old Channel 7 News admonition:

"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is......"

So if any of you readers know anything about MetaArchive and preserving "Our Southern Digital Culture", I would appreciate your getting in touch with me.

Randy Cabell


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