Bones and Joints Get Older; Media Gets Unreadable

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Bones and Joints Get Older; Media Gets Unreadable

3/9/2005

By Terry Calhoun

So, what do I do? I am certain that I am not going to spend several weekends dusting off floppies, putting them into a drive, opening the drive, and then waiting while the files copy over to a hard drive. Even my teenagers still at home are too affluent to accept pay for that kind of mind-numbing job. I sealed up those boxes with duct tape and put them into a closet that we are walling off. It’s our time capsule. Just like that mythical server that was dry walled into a corner and kept chugging away for a decade, they’re there if we need them.

What I really would like to access is an equivalent of those coin counting machines that you can find in department stores and grocery stores nowadays. I could just walk into Meijer and dump a plastic bag full of floppies and Zip discs into a hopper, put in twenty dollars, and wait for everything to be moved in some magical way onto a fresh DVD, which pops out into my hand with all the files on it – then compresses the discs into a little mass of plastic and metal awaiting the trip to the recycling center.

“If only,” I tell myself. “If only I could get those all onto a hard drive, then they would be accessible and useable forever.” Part of me is convinced that the new software like Picasa, which is doing an excellent job with my 26,000+ newer digital images, or the Google desktop search software which has gone from Beta introduction to the real world in a record five months, will let me organize and find everything. Maybe.

I know, in the dimmer, less conscious parts of my mind, that there will be future issues with software and file format compatibility, but surely the folks working on ePortfolios and with the concept of personal, private, lifetime, unlimited digital data storage will take care of those issues for me as life g'es along. Maybe.

However, even as we struggle with waves of changes in campus IT, from administrative computing to academic computing; from commercial ERP to open source; there are little piles – digital and physical – of old data and old media in the corners, and they’re getting bigger.

Help me out, please. I’m about to spend some time researching what folks are doing about permanent storage and retrieval for digital files – both on a personal level like my current issues and on an institutional level. If any of you readers out there can steer me to some of the folks and sites that are addressing those issues, I’d appreciate it. Just send a message to me at terry.calhoun@scup.org. Thanks! I will definitely report back what I learn.

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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Terry Calhoun, "Bones and Joints Get Older; Media Gets Unreadable," Campus Technology, 3/9/2005, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=40135

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