I'm sure glad that 15489 belongs to another technical committee.  ( ;-) back at you.) Actually our representative from the accredited secretariat was pretty good at shepherding us around and keeping us in line, although it didn't sound like anyone strictly watched the five year cycle very closely. I don't ever recall nasty messages about it from Geneva and it was always the secretariat that tapped us on the shoulder to say, "ahem."

One thing about having a writing dye and not being stamped is that it leaves one more avenue open for catastrophic failure. Leave a dye-writable disc laser side up in a nice sunny spot on your desk for a weekend and you get a nice shiny Frisbee (flying disk?) by Monday.

The general rule of thumb has been that as information density and portability went up, stability went down. Petroglyphs in stone walls aren't very portable and have pretty low information density, but as long as French boy scouts don't try to clean them, they're pretty stable. Cuniform in clay is more portable and carries more information density, but is less stable than a wall of stone. Writing and hides to papyrus to paper improved portability and density, but got less stable. Images from light to moving images from light to moving images with sound to color moving images with sound to digital files move us towards greater portability and data density, but stability continues to go downhill.

-Doug
Douglas Nishimura
Image Permanence institute
Rochester Institute of Technology

-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jesse Wilkins
Sent: Friday, August 09, 2013 12:10 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Quality of CDs

Re: reviewing ISO standards every 5 years, let me just point out that ISO
15489:2001 remains extant. Cough cough. :)

As far as the question goes, yes, there is a difference between silver and gold CDs that has to do with the laminate layers and the chemicals used in the process among other things. Gold CDs are generally higher quality and all else being equal they will last longer.

But as many others have pointed out:
- "Longer" is a relative term, especially for those of you located in more volatile climate areas.
- The reason music CDs last so long is because they are mechanically pressed, not chemically burned.
- The bigger issue by far than the longevity of the media is the longevity of the software required to read them. In other words, if some of those documents are Word 95, or AutoCAD 12, it's generally not going to be a media issue preventing access to them but the ability of Word or its successors to read that proprietary encoding format.

So if you're talking about having convenience copies, sure, go for it - and not sure gold/archival vs. silver make that much of a difference. If you're talking about keeping records for decades, I'd argue that the best bet today is either magnetic or solid state hard disk with regular backups and migrations to then-current storage and file formats. It's not a good answer, but it's better than all the other current approaches today to ensure that you can read those documents well into the future.

--
Regards,

Jesse Wilkins, CIP, CRM

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