|
|
Post by graemestevenson on Apr 6, 2017 17:01:01 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by Simon B Kelly on Apr 8, 2017 20:23:21 GMT
It was nice to take a peek inside the vaults, especially as they don't allow public access.
This particular archive, which Ray Ford described as "one of the largest broadcast archives in the world" holds around 16 million items. These were broken down into:
4.5 million audio and video
6 million sheet music
4 to 5 million photographs
The tape vault he took us into held 850,000 videotapes of complete programmes, all of which have been migrated from either 2", 1" or DV onto LTO, and are now retained as back-ups.
Next we got to see the vinyl vault which houses 350,000 pieces of commercial vinyl. Apparently they still loan out about 200 pieces a month to radio stations and TV producers, even though I would assume all the content must be available digitally by now.
The last vault he showed us was the print vault, which, we were told, holds 1,000,000 items in 400,000 cans, stored at 10 degrees and 35% humidity. Very few have been digitized it seems:
It's good to know that our heritage is being well looked after, although hopefully everything in the archive will be digitized one day, as I'm sure the sheet music, photographs, vinyl and film are not going to last forever...
|
|
|
|
Post by richardwoods on Apr 9, 2017 7:47:13 GMT
hopefully everything in the archive will be digitized one day, as I'm sure the sheet music, photographs, vinyl and film are not going to last forever... Mmm, probably a damn sight longer than the digital copies. Digital is great for public access but as for an archive it has its own risks. It's fine as a secondary copy so long as the originals continue to be maintained and the bean counters don't use it as an excuse to dump the original. Viruses, Trojans, deterioration, degrading, etc. Trouble is once a digital copy deteriorates it's a lot more difficult to restore than a hard copy. Read one of Alistair Reynolds books based on the loss of everything held on digital archive formats following a serious virus and the effect on humanity he calls it the "great forgetting". Makes you think about the wisdom of only relying on digital for archiving. |
|
|
|
Post by martinjwills on Jun 14, 2017 19:06:58 GMT
Digital disk media is not very good for archives, Writable DVDs [DVD+-R] seems to last about 5 years, CDs [CD-R] about 8 years, I dont know about Blu-ray [BD-R] yet as havnt had them for a long time. Many of my DVDs recorded in 2005/6 now show as empty, if you use a deep recovery on them some of the files stored on them are recovered, but a lot of them contain read errors. Photographers need to back up their pictures from Hard Drive every 4 years or so, and keep the old disks as back-ups. Blu-Ray of course has 25GB or 50GB of data to loose on a single disk. Various HD freeview recorders store the recordings encrypted when HD, and Non-BBC HD channels as Copy-Once Encrypted, and if the AACS part of the disk fails the file is harder to recover even if intact.
|
|
|
|
Post by Richard Marple on Jun 15, 2017 12:43:16 GMT
I'll have to double check my recordable discs, I certainly can't remember having any issues with them.
|
|
Kev Hunter
Member
The only difference between a rut and a groove is the depth
Posts: 608
|
Post by Kev Hunter on Jun 16, 2017 7:21:07 GMT
Digital disk media is not very good for archives, Writable DVDs [DVD+-R] seems to last about 5 years, CDs [CD-R] about 8 years. Were you using cheap recordable media / low quality equipment? I ask because I started putting music onto CD-R in 1999/2000 and as yet have not had a problem with any of the discs. Similarly with my oldest DVD-Rs which were recorded in 2007, I've yet to experience any issues. Maybe I've just been lucky. although I have always bought well-known branded media. |
|
|
|
Post by Dan S on Jun 16, 2017 8:30:45 GMT
Digital disk media is not very good for archives, Writable DVDs [DVD+-R] seems to last about 5 years, CDs [CD-R] about 8 years. Were you using cheap recordable media / low quality equipment? I ask because I started putting music onto CD-R in 1999/2000 and as yet have not had a problem with any of the discs. Similarly with my oldest DVD-Rs which were recorded in 2007, I've yet to experience any issues. Maybe I've just been lucky. although I have always bought well-known branded media. Almost exactly the same for me (2000 for CD-R, 2006 for DVD) and the only failures have been some bad batches of Memorex CD-R's |
|
|
|
Post by martinjwills on Jun 16, 2017 14:58:32 GMT
I have used various branded disks including verbatim, some with printing on the top side. out of 1000s of disks there have been a few bad batches, the recorders have been top end, The worst have been disks that were recorded as UDF format, rather than written Once and closed. The CD-Rs were blue coloured on the read side, they have been the worst. The Top side that changes colour too were the bad batches.
Its just good practice to back up. I recovered video from 1980 VHS with little problems, it will be interesting to see what can be recovered from CD-R 30 years after they were written.
|
|
