Gold-plated CDRs

[phil cash cash]

Hi Nicolas,

when i think of migration (in the technological sense), i think of an
uncle of mine on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian
Reservation in northeastern Oregon who lives way out in the sticks.  he
has over 200 cassette tapes spanning twenty years of recording
traditional songs and singing.  all the old-time singers are now gone
and his cassettes "archive" is a tribal treasure.  so i plan to meet
with him this coming year, inventory his archive, and digitize his
tapes (migrate them from analog to digital, so to speak).

i think this kind of basic situation is more common than we think,
especially for the native community where technology is still 10+ years
behind the mainstream.  most native community archives are bare string
budgets with a limited technological capacity.  but they are becoming
better despite the digital divide and the demands to modernize.

i marvel at the kinds of technology we utilize on a daily basis at the
university institution.  it is leap years ahead of those in the native
community.  i think the best thing that i can do as a student is raise
awareness, offer some basic guidance, and help where i can.

later,
Phil Cash Cash
UofA, ILAT

Quoting Nicholas Thieberger <thien at UNIMELB.EDU.AU>:

> Phil,
>
> For a serious archival effort we need to look at developing dedicated
> archives that plan for migrating data in future. The use of CDs now
> is putting off the headache until later when you discover that some
> failed to be written properly or that the copying process may have
> introduced errors and in any case all the files copied will need to
> be checked against the original to determine if they are the same or
> not. While there are extravagant claims about 100 year life for CDs,
> that needs to be balanced against the percentage error rate we know
> (from our own painful experience) exists for CD media. And then there
> is the physical problem of handling all of those disks.
>
> On archiving linguistic data see http://www.language-archives.org/
> and in particular the discussion on linguistic archiving here:
> http://emeld.org/school/classroom/archives/index.html.
>
> All the best,
>
> Nick Thieberger
>
>> Thanks Jim & Robert!
>>
>> For non-replaceable language recordings, it makes sense to use media
>> that has the greatest longevity.  This will make archiving less of a
>> worry and more of a "best practice".
>>
>> I imagine that the archival quality ratings for the gold-plated CDRs are
>> applicable also to the gold-plated DVDRs.  Since I will be working with
>> digital video it might be a good practice to use this media too.
>>
>> I took a shallow look on the internet and found that Wipedia has a nice
>> summary of CDRs worth looking at.  They mention Mitsui.
>>
>> CDR
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R
>>
>> Also, here is a link to Mitsui or Mitsui MAM-A.
>> http://store.mam-a-store.com/standard---archive-gold.html
>>
>> For better pricing, you can get the Mitsui MAM-A media a bit cheaper
>> here.
>> http://www.american-digital.com/prodsite/
>>
>> later,
>>
>> Phil Cash Cash
>> UofA, ILAT
>
>
> --
> Project Manager
> PARADISEC
> Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
> University of Melbourne, Vic 3010
> Australia
>
> nicholas.thieberger at paradisec.org.au
> Ph 61 (0)3 8344 5185
>
> PARADISEC
> Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures
> http://paradisec.org.au