Subject
Re: tapes and preservation
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Date
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Dear Jansy:
indeed, H.H.'s worries about the durability of pigments were well founded. Books will wilt and crumble. Audio and video tapes, even if they are not demagnetized by some strong magnetic field, will deteriorate when the magnetic layer begins to dissolve and smear which they reckon is bound to happen after twenty years at the most. This will happen no matter what kind of data they contain, analog or digital. (Magnetic tapes and disks still are the favorite storage medium for digital data.) High quality DVDs whose data carrying layer oxidizes very slowly or not at all will last longer; some hope they may last up to 100 years -- which is still much shorter than the life span of a book printed on durable (acid-free) paper. But digital data are faced with a much more urgent threat than material degradation: the equipment necessary to read them becomes obsolete at an accelerating speed. I am sure that in ten, fifteen years tape recorders will be as rare as LP players or 45 RPM players are today, and so will be our hard discs and their drivers, and even if the hardware is still there, the software that reads the old video formats will not be. So to preserve digital data it will not suffice to store them away safely. Digitization per se does not guarantee longevity. Even digitized material, though potentially everlasting, will not outlast twenty years at the most unless somebody intervenes. That's why it will be imperative to re-copy all the material every once in a while on up-to-date equipment and according to up-to-date standards and why not just any library or archive is a good place for preservation. It must be one that you trust will be up to the challenge.
As for my own video tapes, Nabokov or not, I have copied them to DVDs years ago. It was my own "digitization project", so to speak, though I never thought of calling it that because, if you have a VHS player and a DVD recorder, the procedure technically is as straightworward as copying one tape onto another. It's time consuming, though, because the copying happens in real time. Thus copying the Nabokov interview takes c. 4 hours, the documentaries 5 and the movies 19. You don't have to sit there and watch all the time, but you have to be around and do some pre- and "postproduction" work. Copying from DVD to DVD does not abbreviate the procedure. It only saves you the trouble of running the tapes backward and forward each time to look for the spots you want to copy.
By the way, the list of the Nabokov video material has been on Zembla for years. The interview section is a little out of date and will be updated as soon as I get around to do it. I hope others are better in finding it there than I am.
Dieter
Berlin, August 23, 2006 -- 9:30am
post@dezimmer.net
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
indeed, H.H.'s worries about the durability of pigments were well founded. Books will wilt and crumble. Audio and video tapes, even if they are not demagnetized by some strong magnetic field, will deteriorate when the magnetic layer begins to dissolve and smear which they reckon is bound to happen after twenty years at the most. This will happen no matter what kind of data they contain, analog or digital. (Magnetic tapes and disks still are the favorite storage medium for digital data.) High quality DVDs whose data carrying layer oxidizes very slowly or not at all will last longer; some hope they may last up to 100 years -- which is still much shorter than the life span of a book printed on durable (acid-free) paper. But digital data are faced with a much more urgent threat than material degradation: the equipment necessary to read them becomes obsolete at an accelerating speed. I am sure that in ten, fifteen years tape recorders will be as rare as LP players or 45 RPM players are today, and so will be our hard discs and their drivers, and even if the hardware is still there, the software that reads the old video formats will not be. So to preserve digital data it will not suffice to store them away safely. Digitization per se does not guarantee longevity. Even digitized material, though potentially everlasting, will not outlast twenty years at the most unless somebody intervenes. That's why it will be imperative to re-copy all the material every once in a while on up-to-date equipment and according to up-to-date standards and why not just any library or archive is a good place for preservation. It must be one that you trust will be up to the challenge.
As for my own video tapes, Nabokov or not, I have copied them to DVDs years ago. It was my own "digitization project", so to speak, though I never thought of calling it that because, if you have a VHS player and a DVD recorder, the procedure technically is as straightworward as copying one tape onto another. It's time consuming, though, because the copying happens in real time. Thus copying the Nabokov interview takes c. 4 hours, the documentaries 5 and the movies 19. You don't have to sit there and watch all the time, but you have to be around and do some pre- and "postproduction" work. Copying from DVD to DVD does not abbreviate the procedure. It only saves you the trouble of running the tapes backward and forward each time to look for the spots you want to copy.
By the way, the list of the Nabokov video material has been on Zembla for years. The interview section is a little out of date and will be updated as soon as I get around to do it. I hope others are better in finding it there than I am.
Dieter
Berlin, August 23, 2006 -- 9:30am
post@dezimmer.net
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm