Brian writes: > Dunno, but it's a truly crazy idea. Film degenerates; numbers don't. Why > do you suppose we still have Greek literature, but only shadows of the > painting and sculpture. aside from linguistic and semantic interpretation, those same greek works are readable with merely a set of eyes and a brain (much as film is). 1's and 0's in vast quantities prove somewhat more difficult, let alone including the problems of delaminated CD's, error ridden DVD's, crashed, accidentally formatted or scrambled HDD's . It's funny too that the following document http://www.lib.washington.edu/Preservation/presrpt.pdf regarding the preservation and archiving of images amoung other things *accepts* that much of the data storage done recently will be lost, and they see the challenge of preserving digitised data as being a very large and difficult task. Hence the choice to undertake 'hybid' storage, preserving the likes of books in the original format ( a book), on film (hehe! :-) and digitally. not sure if it was this same mob, but if not then another prestigeous US Library was undertaking a process where archived images under threat or suffering damage were digitally scanned then outputted back to photographic paper again for long term storage. Again, the main justification was that no data corruption would eliminate the image in a viewable paper (photographic) form, and no electronic interpretter was required to see the images. An aerial survey mob here converted all their images to 600 dpi images some years back and dumped all the 10x10 film images. I wonder how great the images would be from that bleeding edge technology of the day compared to the film they destroyed. doesn't really matter. they've lost vast chunks of that data now anyway.. All gone. Now if they'd scanned them all at 4000 dpi and generated 1,600 Mp images then stored them as tif's I'd guess that it would take something like a whole hard drive to store the data! but you're right. If they'd been able to store that data in an incorruptable, permanent manner the images would still be accessible today. Much as the film would have been had they not destroyed it. whether it's crazy or not, a sheet of film packs in an awful lot of data. I'm guessing you won't be outputting to film Brian ;-) k
