You bring up a good point, Lea. I think a lot has to do with the largely non-physical properties of digital media. I heard somewhere that whenever a massive series of zeros and ones is copied, a few ones turn to zeros and vice-versa. The illusion of permanence is a strong factor in today's world. Everything degenerates, from film to magnetic media, to some degree. My negatives and slides have, in the past, been stored in a non-functioning (modified) dorm refrigerator left by the curb in one of my former neighborhoods, effectively water- and fire-proof. My best work has been scanned and saved in several locations on separate drives and CDs. Some time ago I noticed that some of the CDs had deteriorated around the inner and outer edges, which raised the issue of reburning, and more to the point, the awareness that maintaining current copies is necessary, even for something previously believed to be more or less permanent. An aside here: Would burning a CD with an enormous "gibberish" (text?) file preceding the images prolong their integrity in the event of inner-track decay? If the text file is damaged, nothing worthwhile will be lost, but I don't know if that would hinder the disc's map from being able to find the "good" files. It's really not my area of expertise... Another reasonable solution, which satisfies the tangibility-of-images dilemma is, of course, to make the very best archival prints possible from the digital files and store them as you would original negs/slides/4x5s/prints/whatever. A duplicate set could be sent off-site, preferably to a trusted faraway relative in case of a local or regional catastrophe. Hmmm. Just thinking via the keyboard. Darin Heinz Melbourne, Florida USA
