OT: Archiving data/video/movies/photos/oral history

From: Shawn T. Rutledge <rutledge_at_cx47646-a.phnx1.az.home.com>
Date: Fri Jun 2 23:46:51 2000

On Fri, Jun 02, 2000 at 11:21:16AM -0500, McFadden, Mike wrote:
> color fidelity. We have discussed CD-ROM and other digital media. Our goal

Doing the transfer from film to digital is no small matter either. I
think what the world needs is a "universal film scanner" - a device with
a linear CCD and powered rollers to feed the film through, regardless of
the spacing of the frames, sprocket holes, size of the film, etc. If you
digitize the entire film strip, software could be used to detect the
frame boundaries later and even correct for spacing inconsistences which
cause the picture to jump around when viewed on a conventional projector.
I really want to find or build a scanner like that some day. So far the
film scanners I have seen appear to support only the common sizes, and
they don't scan arbitrary lengths of film either.

> databases, to Access databases. A computer database is no help to try to

Access is a kind of "evolving"? Now there's an unstable data storage
system if I ever saw one. Especially if (as I suspect) MS keeps changing
the file format with every new version like they do with their other Office
products. Most likely you'd need the same vintage PC up and running
with the same vintage software in order to read the database a few years
from now. But I don't know what database system is the most change-
resistant. Maybe SQL will continue to exist for a very long time yet, so
you could archive the database as a sequence of SQL statements to create
the tables and insert the data; that way it's independent of the on-disk
format.

> figure out why the sewer line was run through my yard and not on the sewer
> easement in 1960. Written notes in the ledger help me to understand that the
> rock was in the way and that hand digging was easier through my yard. Now
> if you want to know why one house is constructed over the water and not on
> shore that is another story. CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING.

Yep. The world needs a good knowledgebase system too, and more than
anything that's the problem I'd like to solve.

-- 
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 (_  | |_)          http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud  kb7pwd_at_kb7pwd.ampr.org
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Received on Fri Jun 02 2000 - 23:46:51 BST

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