Long term archival image data storage?

[ho_co]

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That's a horror story, Wilson. How long has it been since the theft?

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[wlaidlaw]

That's a horror story, Wilson. How long has it been since the theft?

 

Last November.

 

One of the things that really annoyed me was the attitude of the teachers accompanying the children (Oi watcher doing mista was the level of the kids' interest). The teachers seemed to take the attitude that I should not have expensive lenses to steal and as I had, it was all my fault. They showed no interest whatsoever in trying to recover my lens from their light fingered charges. With attitudes like that, with which they will have no doubt imbued their pupils, the actions of teens and pre-teens in last week's UK riots does not come as a shock to me.

 

The museum say they have tried and failed to recover from their insurers and have now reached the stage of just shrugging their shoulders. I have pointed out repeatedly that it was their staff, who allowed strangers into what had been agreed, would be a closed off area (a back room with a big skylight to give natural lighting, to try and get the colours correct).

 

Sadly I am going to have to take the museum to the small claims court when I get back to the UK, which is more hassle. The only upside of doing that is that I will now ask for full replacement cost of around £1,000 rather than the £500 which the lens cost me two years ago.

 

Wilson

[andybarton]

And you are still working for this museum?

[stunsworth]

There was a LUF meeting yesterday in New York that addressed the issue of preservation. There's a PDF of what I assume are slides from the presentation here...

 

http://www.leica-users.org/NYLUG-2011.pdf

 

Naturally there's a lot missing since this is just the display material not the full presentation, but I think it raises some valid concerns.

 

Personally I don't expect anything I've done to survive much beyond me.

 

I should also add that I wasn't at the presentation, I picked this up from a link Tina Manley posted to the LUF.

[wlaidlaw]

And you are still working for this museum?

 

Andy,

 

I don't think they will be asking me back. When I went to see the museum manager afterwards, her main thrust appeared to be to castigate me for asking the curator if she was bonkers allowing the children into a closed off area with thousands of pounds worth of equipment and a totally irreplaceable book This was not even the museum's property and apparently I had spoken "in an aggressive manner".

 

It was due to my efforts in trying to keep the kids fingers off the book, that I did not notice the lens being filched until I had managed to shoo the kids out. The wet curator had disappeared in tears after my original comment. Things were said between me and the museum manager in the heat of the moment that perhaps should have remained unsaid. In retrospect, I should have ignored the museums request not to call the police and called them immediately I found the lens missing, just a couple of minutes after the theft.

 

Wilson

[andybarton]

Not good.

 

So is this a different museum from the one that you started this thread about?

[wlaidlaw]

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Andy,

 

Yes - I think I am probably black listed by the whole of Wiltshire, where the even occurred.

 

Wilson

[Michael Geschlecht]

Hello Wilson,

 

I'm sorry to hear about your lens. What is happening to you is really wrong.

 

Add to that: I know you really like that lens.

 

About archival stability: What if you tell people you can give them relatively inexpensive significant archival stability by using silver, not chromogenic, Black & White film & leaving the record on negatives. No more to store than Kodachrome.

 

Better a really good B&W image a hundred or so years from now than a color image of lesser quality degraded by who knows what or for what reason.

 

I'm in the process of making my already State recognized & designated Historic Firehouse into a National Historic Site. In the USofA the Federal Government accepts silver based B&W for National Historic Site archival submissions.

 

Best Regards,

 

Michael

[norm_snyder]

Late to this discussion, but a number of you have thoughtful, useful advice, and as I recently scanned some negs from the 1960's, it was clear that the film I archivally processed then is still looking fine. Even some XP1 in dark, temperature controlled storage still scans nicely [but does have a little fade]. But what about archival prints as back up?

 

I have continued a habit that began many years ago of making an archival sliver based, exhibition print of any work I might ultimately want to display, sell, etc. I have continued this habit with my black and white digital pigment based prints: finished prints in archival boxes, etc. My strategy then is two mirrored external hard drives, a third hard drive stored off site, and back up CD's or DVD's + archival prints of each finished print. If I return to a file and print it differently than the original treatment, I make new back-ups, and save them along side the original back ups.