CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
thestar.com
thestar.com
On the other hand, it's also clearly an issue of controlling who has access to the material - I highly doubt it will be simply dumped online for free. So once you take it out of the live, high maintenance archive, you will not throw it in the rubbish or donate them to a friendly NGO, since that might limit your ability to control it in the future.
Magnetic tape is hard to keep. Film is even harder, it is flammable and decays as well. Needs controlled atmosphere to keep well.
Digital data tapes have a nice layer of error correction on top.
Better than film, but still requires some care.
In contrast, I can read anything from the Barbarastollen with a magnifying glass and sunlight, today and in 500 years.
I bet in the very long term it's not. I suspect that error correction on digital tape is only meant to address the problem of magnetic spots flipping or fading over time, but the tapes are throwaways as soon as there's detectable physical degradation or disintegration. Contrast with analog tape (or to speak to your point, film) which can be handled in all kinds of crazy ways (cleaning, baking, coating, etc.) in order to get at least a partial or imperfect copy of the original made.
The cellulise acetate used for 16mm films up through the 80s has to be kept in humidity and temperature controlled environments or it breaks down quickly into acetic acid which accelerates the process further.
Cellulose acetate film was introduced to replace highly unstable nitrate stock in the 30s. With in a decade of its introduction, archives were reporting significant degradation and it was realized that it needed to be stored in climate controlled conditions. It wasn't until the 80s however that serious efforts were put into preservation or development of better archival mediums.
Of course this was touched on in the article. Wikipedia had more information.
CBC are destroying the records regardless.
Case in point, this recent restoration of Morecambe and Wise by BBC R&D: http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-12-morecambe-wise-video-fi...
They laser cut the film apart, then used X-ray microtomography to scan the film and some very clever software to unwarp layers from the 3D data produced by the X-ray microtomography process. Not exactly something we could've done 5 years ago.
Please post to HN front page and re-post as updates occur!
In the case of the Morecambe and Wise recordings, this was video to film (with an additional step to try to lose information in the first conversion so that the scan lines were less visible) so the interesting technique here was simply in restoring a degraded source. Unlike scans of film negatives, there is no way a new process or technique is going to dig out information that the original low-fidelity recording system was simply unable to capture.
Now if the support is in poor conditions, perhaps the technologies mentioned in the other posts are worth considering. But if it is a tape or film stored in decent condition, it is unlikely that future techniques will add much to current ones.
From the article: It also questioned why Radio-Canada was preserving its master recordings after making digital copies but CBC had opted to rely only on digital copies
This statement shows a lack of understanding of the problem. Old audio recordings can still be played. Old video recordings from the early VTRs[1] are going to be unplayable soon: the people who have the skill to refurbish an old VTR are well into retirement age now. There are only a handful of the original VTRs still operating.
I'm surprised generic non-contact magnetic readers haven't been developed for retro tech given the prevalence of magnetic storage tech for HDDs.
Seems to me that might in some ways be similar to some things required for software defined radio signal processing.
They dont face any threat of not beeing readable anymore and therefore storage becoming a waste of money, gradually
In a video the media - the original film - is already just a copy of the original performance. Unless you are interested in the history of the physical media for it's own sake because it's unusual in some way I don't think it's the same thing. Is the media even the original negative that was in the studio? I don't think so.
When a robot/printer is able to make a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa down to the brush strokes, and we can experience it in VR without even needing the replica, the answer to your question might change for most works too.
(I find the idea of intentionally destroying the originals to be ludicrous, but hey, more future-proofing is always good)
What is it about original artwork that makes it so important as to need eternal preservation?
In David's case, maybe the fact that Michelangelo was able to carve it out of a fragile and partially sculpted block that at least two other great artists refused to use. It's an engineering feat at least as much as an artistic one.
If we did that, what would we have lost? Just curious...
Paper and film are fairly durable. They can be preserved without any maintenance for quite a long time.
Format obsolescence means that it can be hard to read old files. Sometimes, you need to track down a precise version of a program. The more tricky issue is that sometimes a file can render, but incorrectly on more modern versions.
Also, digital files require specialized software to read, whereas paper documents are immediately readable. Film is also readable to a certain extent without equipment.
Digital files might be deemed useless at some point in the future and dumped in the trash. Or there might not be enough money to transfer the files to a new medium.
Analogue files render incorrectly too; surfaces deteriorate - media rots, oxidises, decays.
I've got digital files from last millennium that have survived better than analogue ones - both written text and images. For the most important I've kept logical and physical redundancy (but not yet needed it); much harder to do with bulky physical media.
Libraries in my UK city, and across the UK, have been closed rapidly in the last few years - the materials are generally dumped/sold, but the data from all of them could be held in a small box (computer) with multiple redundant backups for the cost of a couple of magazine subscriptions. For one librarians wage this could all be easily shared with the entire web.
We, or at least I, am keen to hang on to some artefacts. But a lot of what we keep seems to be primarily useful for navel gazing.
Hard to see this as anything other than an attempt to minimize and erase Canadian culture, such as it is. Nice A / B with the french counterpart, where there is political will to bolster theirs.