Family members in
New England, California and Uzbekistan will now have baby and school
photos they never would have seen otherwise.

CDs and DVDs have been shown to degrade in less than ten years. I have a
"crumbling paper book" from WWII. 50 years from now, do you think you'll
still be able to read those disks? Do you think the technology 50 years
from now will even be compatible with those disks?


Quite right in your assumptions. However, at least one of those albums I
scanned won't last another 50 years. It's already crumbling into yellow dust.
Without this effort, we would be left with nothing.

I'm not saying don't archive to CD and DVD. I'm just saying, don't think
you can simply put it on disk, forget about it for 50 years, and still
have pictures to look at.

I'm fortunate in having a family that is computer literate. We are concerned
with archival preservation and, since the photos are now in digital form, they
will be copied to new media as the technology advances. My sister had a
business of transferring old 8 - 16 and super 8 movies to VHS. The next step
now is to transfer those VHS tapes to DVD. The movies are still in film format,
the VHS tapes are an additional version and DVD will be yet another chance to
keep these movies intact and spread family history around.

The most notable thing I've noticed is that we never know what is going to be
most useful to the future.

I'm responsible for creating a CD of old photos for a library history that we
are producing in our town. Some of the most ordinary pictures acquire new
status because of what is in the background. Pictures of a ceremony becomes
important because of the people attending, not the speaker or his printed
speech. Historians must run into this problem all the time, which is why they
want to save EVERYTHING! Can't be done, but at least I can do my part to help.

Earle Rich
Mont Vernon, NH