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Re: [ARSCLIST] Hard disk drives and DAT/ calculating the future / Use LTO's
At 08:10 PM 2007-03-28, Tom Fine wrote:
One other wrinkle to this whole issue.
Andy in Vermont raised the question (to paraphrase) -- well what
about a small archive that can barely afford to keep boxes of tapes
together and is slowly getting everything digitized, should they
stop recording oral histories?
I would say no but consider this -- is it wise to migrate to
something like a flash-memory recorder? Perhaps you should stick
with cassettes until you figure out an inclusive and sustainable
digital strategy.
Just a thought.
Dare I say, a FINE thought!
It has merit on the face of it, but there are some considerations
that we need to review:
(1) The cost of digitizing the cassette may exceed the original
acquisition cost (OK, I'm talking myself out of work here, but there
are already enough cassettes to feed my Dragons until they start
breathing fire--at which point they'll need to be retired). By the
way, the useful life of the Dragon's heads is about 10,000 hours--I
just saw in a brochure about the machine.
(2) Few if any good new cassette machines are being made today
(3) There are fewer and fewer choices in high-quality cassettes as we
move forward.
In (2) and (3), I see the end-game as a race to the bottom.
The ARSC pre-conference workshop will be interesting. John Spencer
will be there (I will not be, I'm arriving later).
I think we've been beating around Andy Kolovos's (from Vermont's)
question in this entire discussion. I think the last two words in the
subject "Use LTO's" is becoming the consensus. I have nothing against
that as long as the migration strategy is there for the relatively
short life-cycle window in LTO (~10 years).
Overall, I am very fond of LTO, but do not currently use it. I would
use it in a heartbeat if there was a client who wanted it. As I've
said ad-nauseam in this thread, I am focusing on the institutional
repository as it takes the responsibility out of the archive's hands
and places it with an IT group focusing on preserving all sorts of
client digital data. The repositories are being considered electronic
publishing--in lieu of paper in some instances.
Cheers,
Richard
Richard L. Hess email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.