The Fate of Digital Collections

Stephen Hussar · **Posted:** Thu Aug 21, 2008 5:16 pm

Alexander D. Mitchell IV wrote:

With negatives, you're soon going to have the exact same problem as 16mm and 8mm movie films, reel-to-reel tapes, and LP's: Far fewer people are going to own an appropriate translator (a tape player, a movie projector, a photo enlarger, etc.)

Ah, but the point is what format has a proven record of survival? After the "big one" happens, like in Charton Heston's Omega Man, we'll still be able to hold those negative strips up the light and see an image...no matter what. Finding a method to print or project will seem easy. ;-)

Alexander D. Mitchell IV · **Posted:** Thu Aug 21, 2008 6:30 pm

Stephen Hussar wrote:

Ah, but the point is what format has a proven record of survival? After the "big one" happens, like in Charton Heston's Omega Man, we'll still be able to hold those negative strips up the light and see an image...no matter what. Finding a method to print or project will seem easy. ;-)

I have three words for you:

Anscochrome.
Ektachrome.
Kodacolor.

If I have to explain it, you've obviously never worked with real photo archives.

It ain't the medium. It's the care someone takes to preserve the images.

I have a fellow NRHS member who has made two hobbies upon his retirement: Creating archival caption/data labels for tens of thousands of railroad slides in the possession of the Maryland Rail Heritage Library; and carefully copying and preserving every "quality" rail photo (old or new) of/from this region that he comes across on RailPictures, TrainOrders, etc.