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According to this article<\/a>, a famous person like John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath, has thousands of pages that will never be digitized.\u00a0 Steinbeck\u2019s work isn\u2019t the only thing lacking digital preservation.\u00a0 Of the 132 million objects held in the Library of Congress, only 10% will probably ever be digitized.<\/p>\nFor the most part I am ahead of the game.\u00a0 All the important papers that I wrote in college are in digital format.\u00a0 We had a mini-mainframe with an ASCII text editor.\u00a0 All my papers fit on one (state of the art at the time) 3.5 inch floppy.\u00a0 I still have that floppy.\u00a0 I have copied it over to a CD for long term storage.<\/p>\n
I went to graduate school immediately after undergrad.\u00a0 It was during this time that I really learned to use a PC to publish.\u00a0 All my writing was done using WordPerfect 4.\u00a0 I used Ventura Publisher for all my publications and CorelDraw 2 (that\u2019s right\u2026 TWO) for all the graphics.\u00a0 I also started to back everything up to a Colorado 120 MB tape drive.\u00a0 I still have all those tapes too.\u00a0 In the box with the tapes I kept an external drive with an eight bit card.\u00a0 Hopefully, if I ever want to retrieve any of that information, I will have a computer with an eight bit slot.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That equipment brought me up to the age web publishing.\u00a0 Since about 1995 I have had access to a CD burner.\u00a0 All of my archives have been to optical disks.\u00a0 Now I have thousands of CDs and DVDs from weekly backups.\u00a0 Last week\u2019s backup filled ten DVDs.<\/p>\n
Over the weekend I was talking to my wife about video of the kids.\u00a0 We have about 100 VHS tapes that we would like to keep, but don\u2019t want to bother with digitizing.\u00a0 I think my dad bought a VHS to DVD recorder last year.\u00a0 I could use that to get all those tapes into digital format.\u00a0 They would take up a lot less space and I wouldn\u2019t be stuck with a VHS player for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n
I try to keep my digital archives in a format that is useful to me as time goes on.\u00a0 For instance, I have used Eudora for my email since 1992.\u00a0 I have fifteen years of email that I can search fairly easily.\u00a0 Just last weekend I needed a username and password that was emailed to me several years ago (I didn\u2019t know what year).\u00a0 I found the message from March of 2004 in about a minute.<\/p>\n
Backups are not only important for the occasional hard drive crash.\u00a0 They are also important for long-term storage of information.\u00a0 Keeping all these things organized is important.\u00a0 I keep a database that has a list of all the archives I have.\u00a0 I number all my disks and record the disk number with the contents of the disk in the database.\u00a0 Every time I burn a new archive set, the first thing on the disk is the database of all the previous archives.\u00a0 So I can pull out last week\u2019s archive and get a list of all my archived disks with their contents.\u00a0 I keep all the disks in binders.\u00a0 I use a Sharpie to write the disk number range on the spine of each binder.\u00a0 That makes it easy to find old information.<\/p>\n
In fifty years it will be interesting to see how much of this information I can still access.\u00a0 As long as I have a DVD drive, I will be safe.\u00a0 I suppose the last DVD I burn will have to go into a box with an external DVD drive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In my garage I have a filing cabinet with one drawer containing all the important papers from my undergraduate courses.\u00a0 In the second drawer I have everything from graduate school.\u00a0 These are all papers and they are approaching twenty years … Continue reading