Here at the Student Multimedia Design Center, we're all about multimedia creation. We're here to provide the equipment, software and hardware, and space to help students create multimedia projects. However, there's another side to the picture that's near and dear to people in the library world, and it all comes down to digital preservation and access. We're moving into a digital world-- and people will have to make choices about what they're going to do with all of the analog stuff that's sitting on shelves and in basements, waiting to be discovered. The ironic thing is that digital media is notoriously bad as a preservation medium. Hard drives will last 5-10 years, if that. DVDs and CDs have a similar shelf life. These are all things people-- especially librarians and archivists-- will have to think about if they want to make sure that all of the digital stuff that we're creating now will be around 20, 30, 50 years from now.
This post is a bit off track from the types of things we normally post on this blog, but this article from the Vancouver Sun made me stop and think for a bit, and I thought it was worth sharing: "CBC music library could be lost."
Thanks for sharing. I agree it's a problem. It is relevant to our department since we are helping digitizing old formats (sounds like a good class idea! ;-)). It also relates to microforms, as I recently heard from a librarian microfilm is still a preferred storage medium for the same reasons. This does sound incredibly short-sighted on the part of the CBC, the article doesn't even say why (space? cost?). I do have some music CDs from the late 80s that still seem to play OK (the last time I checked). But maybe I should make a backup copy.
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