Very interesting meeting with Jim Wharton, English, prof who is in charge of Writers Forum, and John Schroth, owner of Media Transfer Service in East Rochester. John's company has done the digitization of a number of our WF tapes. Jim wants to step up the pace and get a CLIR Mellon Foundation grant to start doing much larger numbers of the tapes.
John's comments lent much support to the concerns for digitization and digital preservation. For example, not only is the life span of many video tape and audio tape formats limited, we are nearing the end of their lifespans at this point. The machines to run them are becoming old and worn out too, and the companies making them, or parts for them, have mostly gone out of business or into other lines of manufacturing. In other words, if one wishes to digitize old VHS, Betamax, reel to reels and so forth, it would be smart to do it sooner than later.
As for digital preservation, the grants specifically asks by what means will the digitized versions of the materials be maintained. John spoke at length about options, he is currently working with Geneseo for example, they got a grant from this fund and are maintaining the digital material on a set of LTO tape drives, as well as using cloud storage. We need something more than a RAID drive sitting on a back office PC where it is never checked...
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