Talk amongst yourselves…
August 20, 2007
I’m on my way out of town for a much needed family vacation.
While I’m away, I’m leaning on ya’ll to keep the content of The Practical Archivist blog fresh & interesting.
I’m unabashedly stealing from two of my favorite entertainers.
From Mike Myers, I’m stealing the Linda Richman trick of stating a topic an imploring viewers to discuss.
From Chris over at Genealogue, I’m stealing the topic of discussion (which he nicked from a neat-o thread at Mental Floss).
* What’s the oldest thing you use regularly?
(OK. I admit it’s not as funny as “The Thigh Master is neither a thigh nor a master. Discuss.” but I do what I can…)
What do you say, family archivists? I’m thinking we can smoke the Mental Floss readership in the history department.
How you can help: Leave a note in the comments field about your oldest treasures. Upload a photo (or photos) to Flickr with the tag “oldestpractical” and I’ll feature it in my first post after I return next week. I’ll also reveal my oldest treasures.
One last note: This seems like a good time to run down the rules for the Practical Archivist comments section: No spam. No dissing other people’s treasures.
Thanks for your assistance, dear readers. I’m off to the Chippewa Valley. Woo hoo!
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Happy 25th, Compact Disc!
August 18, 2007
Yesterday — August 17, 2007 — was the CD’s 25th birthday.
Who could have predicted that this little piece of plastic would become a common storage medium for digital documents and photographs? (Extra credit question: When was the last time you saw a floppy disk?)
Who imagined back in the 80s that we’d be able to buy cheap blank discs for pennies and burn them at home? Not me, that’s for sure.
Wired has an article about this anniversary. Here’s my favorite blurb, which serves as an excellent reminder that the only constant is change:
By 1988 CDs outsold records. Now, the CD may be seeing the end of its days. CD sales have fallen sharply to 553 million sold in the United States last year, a 22 percent drop from its 2001 peak of 712 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Netbuzz (via Slashdot) has an article, too. This one is much funnier, and it’s aimed at the youngbloods:
Gather ’round kids cuz Grandpa Buzzblog is gonna tell a story. Remember how your jaws all dropped the first time you saw HD-TV and realized how much better it was than crappy ol‘ regular TV? Well, your Gramps and his homies had a similar epiphany 25 years ago when the compact disc first emerged as an alternative to records. What’s a record? … Another story for another day, kids, lemme go on here while I still have the wind.
Although they were introduced in 1982, I didn’t purchase my first CD until 1988. I didn’t even have a player at the time, but I found a copy of Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights
That’s right, folks — The Practical Archivist is not an early adopter.
How about you, do you remember your first CD? Leave a comment if you do.
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Do all your photos look the same?
August 16, 2007
Then remind yourself that your great-grandchildren will more than likely be strangers to you. Will they really want to keep all of your photographs?
Try a new perspective the next time you’re snapping away. Get down on the ground. Climb up on a chair. Stand behind your subject. For really powerful portraits, don’t be afraid to get real close.
My brother took this incredibly sweet photograph of my nephew Charlie last month. It tells a story about how tiny he is at this age that other photographs simply don’t capture. Now don’t get me wrong — I need LOTS of photos of his chubby yummy face, too. But I need photos like this one as well.
Read more of my advice about purging your photo collection of dreck:
- Photo Organizing Tips: What to Keep?
- 5 Tips for Preserving Your Family Photographs (Tip #1: You can’t keep everything.)
- Shhh…can you hear what your photos are saying?
- What to Keep? What to Toss?
Beautifully anachronistic Victorian steampunk computer
August 14, 2007
I don’t know about you, but need a break from all the headaches of digital preservation. Lots of questions and speculation, very few concrete answers.
I’ll return to this topic in a while (I promise) but until then, let’s take a break and have a bit of fun, eh?
The video above is a delightful peek into Datamancer’s steampunk workshop.
What is steampunk?
This video from the Wall Street Journal is a nice introduction to the genre. For more info, check out the Wikipedia entry or visit one of my favorite steampunk blogs:
P.S. I love how Mr. Datamancer weilds that leatherman tool thing-a-majig. A cross between a Zippo trick and a rock n’ roll drummer. Hooray for the tinkers!
UPDATE: According to Sneaky Business, there could be an off-the-shelf steampunk laptop available in the future. If it starts with a key, I will swoon.
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Reader questions and comments re: JPEG
August 12, 2007
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One of the reasons why I keep harping on JPEG is that I want you to realize that the format used by digital cameras might disappear someday. Obsolescence ain’t pretty, and if you’re like most people you probably never think about it.
Anyhoo. I started to to address the new questions in the comments section, but figured that if I pulled everything into a new post more folks could join in the discussion.
**PLEASE NOTE: My comments are in BLUE – so reading this via RSS feed will be confusing. You might want to click through and read this post on the blog itself.
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I have often wondered what would be the best way to preserve my digital files. I shoot in RAW format and save a backup of those files as digital negatives. From there I process in photoshop and save JPEG – your post has me thinking I should possible look at tiff format – which is supposedly the best way to save without the compression of a JPEG.
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Legacy Lady, TIFF is considered “best archival practice” in large part because it is completely lossless and uncompressed. TIFF is also preferred because it isn’t tied to any single company or camera manufacturer.
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For images that are born digitally as JPEG files (family snapshots, for example) you can choose to keep them as JPEGs or convert them to TIFF. You’ll need a software program like Photoshop to do this.
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REMEMBER YOU CAN ALWAYS PRINT OUT YOUR FAVORITES. For family snapshots this is my A#1 preservation advice. It’s cheaper than ever and you only have to print the ones you really love. Compared to what we used to spend on film developing, this cost is minimal.
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Legacy Lady, here are a few comments on your post:
* The raw “negatives” are a great idea, but be aware that older raw formats can disappear and programs to process them years from now may be difficult to find. I’m being a bit paranoid here, but it’s happened before. Agreed. Betamax, anyone?
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* Please be certain to store one copy of the DVD/CD in a remote location in case of fire, tornado, theft, etc. at your home. Yes! Offsite storage is key. And in the case of large scale disasters like hurricanes, you’ll want that offsite location to be far away and not just across town in your office.
- * There’s no “do it and forget it” kind of easy answer with digital. Periodic updating or upgrading is a fact of our digital life. This is so true. It’s not a pretty picture. Yep. Our old methods for dealing with photos are not at all helpful in the digital environment.
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* Highest quality jpeg is a lot smaller in size and very nearly as good as tiff, except for large format, high resolution color photographs. It’s easy to do a side by side comparison to decide whether it’s satisfactory for you.
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While very high quality JPEG may look similar to TIFF to the naked eye, it’s not just image quality that is the issue here. One of the major problems with lossy compression like JPEG is that altering the image in any way (change its size, add a caption, crop it, color enhance it, etc. etc. etc.) results in a loss of quality every time you save the new information.
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If you are not going to make any changes, then you don’t need to worry much. Except for the fact that the JPEG format itself may fall out of favor and become obsolete. (see original post for more details).
Coffee-stained cyanotypes
August 9, 2007
Sometimes, you put a question out to the universe and something marvelous comes back. Just last week, I featured DIY Maven’s neat-o method for antiquing paper using instant coffee. I mused about how cool it would be to dye photographs using coffee. Ersatz sepia. (Read the original post here.)
Then I got an email from my friend Bob. Turns out his brother makes his own cyanotypes. Then he dyes them in wine. Or he dyes them in coffee.
The result is spooky-cool, and the images look like they’ve washed up from another era. Those hauntingly beautiful plastic hummingbirds you see above are just one example. There’s even an El Camino, be still my heart. Check out Mark’s photography blog.
What is a cyanotype?
To create a cyanotype all you need is two chemicals, negative film, sunlight and water. The two chemicals dissolved in water become a photo-sensitive solution that you paint onto paper. After exposure to UV rays and rinsing in water, the two chemicals react in such a way that you are left with a permanent dye called Prussian Blue.
If you’ve ever seen a vintage blueprint, you’ve seen a cyanotype.
The process was discovered in 1842, but it didn’t become photography until Anna Atkins got her hands on it a year later. Ms. Atkins — a scientist who is credited as the first female photographer — created a limited series of cyanotypes by pressing ferns and other botanical specimens onto the light sensitive paper and exposing them to sunlight.
Read more about cyanotypes in (on?) The Wiki.
[Photo Credits: Mark Hemauer, Anna Atkins cyanotypes via wikipedia.]
Microsoft’s new format could replace JPEG within a year
August 3, 2007
Just days after I wrote about how Microsoft is making a concerted effort to render JPEG obsolete, I learned that folks in the library/archives world have been discussing the possibility of JPEG 2000 as an acceptable format for long term digital preservation. Instead of, or in addition to, TIFF.
I learned about this from Jill Hurst Wall’s Digitization 101 blog. Jill had a post about JPEG 2000, which led me to a post at Peter Murray’s blog (still with me?) in which he gives 5 reasons why he thinks JPEG 2000 is a good choice for preservation. For more information, see the official JPEG2000 page and wikipedia entry.
But before you get too excited about JPEG 2000…
Yesterday brought some important news from the digital photo preservation front, via ArsTechnica. Here’s the opening paragraph:
Microsoft’s ongoing attempt to establish its own photo format as a JPEG alternative (and potential successor) took another step forward today when the JPEG standards group agreed to consider HD Photo (originally named Windows Media Photo) as a standard. If successful, the new file standard will be known as JPEG XR.
The best news about this is that JPEG XR (what the JPEG standards group is calling Microsoft’s HD Photo format) has lossless compression, which is a great improvement over the original JPEG format. But then so did JPEG 2000.
For more information about Microsoft’s HD Photo, read the full article at ArsTechnica.com.
upgrade all of our digital photos into the new format.
But, hey! It’ll be the perfect excuse for all of us the check those CDs and DVDs and make sure they still work, right?
Right?…..
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Related articles:
Does Microsoft’s new format spell the end of JPEG?
