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Bonita Weddle: Hi, I'm Bonita Weddle. I am the coordinator of
the electronic records unit at the New York State Archives, and
my job is to ensure that computer files and multimedia
materials of enduring value are preserved and made accessible
over time. Today I am going to talk a little bit about how you
can ensure that your computer files and multimedia materials
remain intact and accessible over your lifetime. As we all
know, electronic materials are becoming a lot more popular than
traditional paper and analog materials. Instead of writing
letters a lot of us use e-mail and digital cameras such as this
are now a lot more popular and audio CDs have replaced
traditional audio cassettes such as this. Likewise DVDs are
replacing analog videocassettes. People think electronic
materials are a lot more durable and a lot more stable than paper
and film. In reality they are much more fragile. There are a
number of reasons for this. First off, hardware and storage
media change very rapidly. For example, a few years ago 3 ½
inch diskettes such as this were ubiquitous. You could find them
in everyone's home, everyone's office. Nowadays, most computers
being sold lack drives that can read these disks. For instance
this laptop has no floppy disk drive, and as the number of
working computers that have floppy disk drives decline, it
is going to become increasingly difficult to recover data stored
on these disks. The fate of the floppy disk is really something
every electronic medium will eventually face, whether it is a
memory card such as that within this digital camera, USB flash
drive that a lot of people use these days, data tapes such as
we use to back up our servers, and audio CDs and DVDs. All of
these things will eventually be replaced. We are starting to see
it happen with CDs and DVDs. As if that were not bad enough, all
of these things are inherently unstable. Hard drives such as
that within this laptop are prone to mechanical failure.
They can also become demagnetized, which is something
that can happen to these disks. USB flash drives. People love
these things. They have a way of dying without warning. They have
finite life spans. Manufacturers will not tell what that life
span is. And CDs and DVDs can corrode or the layers that
comprise the disk can separate and render the data unreadable.
So those are the problems associated with hardware. We
also need to take into account, issues associated with software.
Software changes very rapidly over time, and if you have
created a file using an older program, you might not be able
to open that file today, even with the newer version of the
very same program that you used. Moreover, many of the most
popular software applications in use today are proprietary. That
is they are owned and controlled by a single company and the
files they create are in formats owned and controlled by that
company. Sometimes companies allow other firms to create
software that will access those files, sometimes they don't.
Sometimes they decide that it no longer makes business sense to
support a given format, and so the format gradually dies. So
how do we overcome these challenges? I am going to share
with you a few tips. First of all, if you have e-mails, other
text documents, or still digital images that you truly cherish,
you should strongly consider printing them out. For e-mails
and other textual documents, a black and white laser printer
will produce prints that are most likely to stand the test of
time and for digital images a commercial photo lab will
produce prints that are a lot more stable than those that you
can produce at home with an inkjet or even a color laser
printer. It is not always possible to print out electronic
materials. So we will need to do other things to keep them alive
over time. For analog videocassettes and
audiocassettes that contain musical performances, answering
messages, so on and so forth, the thing to do is to arrange to
have them converted to digital format. There are a lot of
vendors out there that will do this for you, but you really
need to know a bit about the technical specs involved to
ensure that you get files that will meet your needs. And
finally, the most important piece of advice I can give you
is you need to plan. Every 3 to 5 years you are probably going
to need to take some sort of action to ensure that your
materials survive over time. It may mean copying materials on
older media such as this floppy disk on to newer media or on to
the hard drive of your computer. It may mean converting your
files from an older version of a format to a newer version of the
very same format, or converting your files from one format to
another to ensure that you will be able to read them even as
technology changes. For more information about how to do this
and some options for converting your older files, be sure to
check our website. Keeping electronic media alive over time
can be a real challenge, but with a little planning and
effort, we can make it happen.