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
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-----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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