Steven Allison-Bunnell wrote:

> While attractive in their convenience, a digital format has huge
> preservation issues on down the road as these current formats become legacy
> technologies. Memory Stick, MP3, Mini-Disk, etc., could be very short-lived
> formats given the speed of change.

Surely the point of digital is that it can be migrated across platforms once recorded and endlessly preserved. One recognizes that there will be a time and money consideration to the migration, but it is still easy to do.

>
>
> A standard professional-grade cassette deck (not dictation micro-cassettes)
> such as still made by Marantz, recorded onto 60 minute high quality tapes,
> is still your best bet for maintaining the original for an extended period.

Comes the first magnet and it's toast. And given the explosion of digital, how much longer are companies going to produce tape recorders using rust as a recording medium stuck onto plastic. Archivists are awfully touchy about playing sacred tapes once in their clutches, so what's
the accessibility going to be in 25 years, if you can find a machine that works, and assuming the tape hasn't degraded?

>
>
> Offering copies on CD is still an option down the line.

The paradigm has already altered. Once on electronic media, it's usable by a far larger segment of the public, it's archivally migratable and stable. And a big point is that all reproductions are first generation and continue at that quality.

It's time to look at the possibilities rather than the problems of the past.

Lyle

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