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Re: Wa Sunshine Kits...

Tim O'Connor
 


I think wide sharing is really is the best guarantee of -digital- preservation, at least for a generation.
After I'd scanned a few thousand slides, I shared a large number of them via Dropbox. As for thousands
of physical slides, I'm not really sure what to do with them, or with my library of books. It would be a
shame for them to end up in a dumpster.

CD's and other electronic storage is NOT archival - They do degrade over time. Paper has proven to
be the most durable form of preservation, if it's well cared for - and that would include prints. Negatives
and slides (depending on film type) can last a long time, although we don't really know how long that is,
since it has existed for just over 100 years. So much information now exists only in electronic form -
and it requires non-stop money and electricity to preserve it. It worries me. :-\

And don't get me started on cryptocurrency. It's secure - until the electricity and components that keep
it alive just -poof- disappear someday in the future. Just maintaining it already uses more electricity than
dozens of countries use. It is NOT climate friendly.

My entire digital train photos collection is 30 GB now - so I can fit it onto a USB thumb drive. I have
shared (and people have shared with me) thumb drives of photos, so that's a good way to get duplicates
out there in the 'cloud' of enthusiasts.

Tim O'Connor


On 9/7/2021 1:59 PM, Robert G P wrote:

I like your thinking jack!
On Mon, Sep 6, 2021 at 2:06 PM Tim O'Connor <timboconnor@...> wrote:
Jack
Turn them into a massive NFT (non-fungible token). Everybody's doing it ! And then sell it for millions ! :-)
If it's in The Cloud, then it's safe. Or so we are led to believe. :-D
Tim O'Connor

On 9/5/2021 7:38 PM, Jack Burgess wrote:

I have about 3,800 historic photos of my prototype, the Yosemite Valley Railroad. There are actual photo prints of probably 25% of them. The rest are all high resolution scans.

 

Our Trust specifies that all of those photos (plus the scans of all of them) plus research documents, YV documents, etc. be donated to the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. What if there is a house fire? There is a set of CDs of the photos in a fireproof safe. What if there is a massive earthquake and our entire town disappears? Other YV fans across the US (and in the Netherlands) have scans of every photo.

 

Just planning ahead…

 

Jack Burgess



--
Tim O'Connor
Sterling, Massachusetts
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