With all due respect, but this would have to be one of the most ridiculous
things I have ever heard.

If you were to take a 200 gigabyte hard disk, you would have roughly the
equivalent of about 50 million A4 pages.  To film these pages onto 35 mm
microfilm, would take about 50,000 rolls of film.  I could be a bit off in
these guestimates, but the volume of film would be quite substantial.  If
you then convert these documents to a barcode, then the number of images
you need to capture would be astronomical.  I cannot even visualise how
much space 50,000 rolls of film would take up.  I can, however, visualise
how much space a standard 200 GB hard drive takes up (not much at all).

Extend that to the umpteen gazillion terabytes (rounded up, of course, for
the purpose of this rant) of data in existance, and you could probably
bury a large city or a small country in microfilm.  Or need to build a
very large storage facility somewhere cold.

I pity the poor person who has to feed all those microfilm back into the
system to enable the documents to be recreated.  Even worse, I would hate
to be the poor person who had to type in the barcode details if the
barcodes were unreadable (which is suggested in the article).  It would be
much more efficient to retype the document (which assumes that the record
is in document format - a database, or an operating system, or an
application would be impossible to render as a single series of
documents).



John Lovejoy
[log in to unmask]
My views, not my employer (although there was some discussion of this
'solution')

-----Original Message-----
Date:    Wed, 25 May 2005 07:58:57 +0800
From:    Laurie Varendorff <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Ending of Digital Obsolescence

Dear colleagues,

You may find the information detailed below of interest plus the link to the
Paper @ The Ending of Digital Obsolescence

Let the discussion begin!

Regards, Laurie
May 2005 - At the recent second Society for Imaging Science and Technology -
IS&T Archiving Conference - Introduction to Archiving 2005 held at the
Washington Hilton - Washington DC on the 26th to 29th April 2005 an
interesting paper was presented titled - The Ending of Digital Obsolescence
by Michael C. Maxwell and Ken Quick of Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. -
ACS of Texas, USA. For persons wishing to provide for the longevity of
digital data for preservation and archive purposes this paper will be of
great interest. The paper is available for viewing or to download from this
website with the permission of Michael C. Maxwell of Affiliated Computer
Services, Inc. - ACS of Texas, USA. The paper - The Ending of Digital
Obsolescence - @ The Ending of Digital Obsolescence
The process or product discussed in the paper is a commercial product
marketed by ACS and it is referred to by it registered name DatasuranceR.
This is not the last time you will hear of DatasuranceR as this process has
the potential to revolutionise the storage of digital data in any form for
its Long Term - LE preservation over extended periods of time. The media
utilised by DatasuranceR has a stated Long Term - LE preservation period of
LE 500 = 500 years if processed under the appropriate Quality Assurance
procedures and then stored under the required conditions of humidity and
temperature. May DatasuranceR prove to be the answer to the archivists,
records managers, preservations and conservationists prayers for the Long
Term - LE preservation and storage of digital data in any form into the
unknown future!
Mr Daniel Lawrance [Laurie] Varendorff, ARMA
Member of the Western Australian Governments - Digital Records Working Group
(DRWG).
Specialist Technical Writer on Records and Information Management (RIM) and
related subjects, available for hire.
Published Articles available @
http://www.records-management.com.au/publications.shtml?laurie-
A Records Management Professional, and proud of the fact!
Consultant/Trainer/Tutor/Presenter: Records and Information Management
Imaging and Micrographic Specialist: 31 years experience
You may care to visit our web site @  www.records-management.com..au

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