Data migration / microfilm (was PDF (was publication of IASS papers on CDROM))

[Gunthard Mueller]

Dear Dominik,
sorry to hear about your problems in Oxford in the late 80s in connection with
migrating your data.
Actually, I was around at that time in Oxford, too. Wonder if we ever met.
In any case, I can help you with the 5.25" floppies that you can't read any
more.
We run a professional data archiving and migration service here at
e-ternals.com, and we can probably convert data from those old floppies to
something you use, for example an ISO-9660 CD-ROM?
Anyway, do let me know what you need exactly and I'll ask our team to see if
we can help.

Oxford has come a long way. People like Lou Burnard and Susan Hockey
identified the need for normed, standard data exchange in the humanities very
early on and were instrumental in the process of getting us normed! Most of us
nowadays use the SGML ISO complex of norms. I generally encourage these norms,
too, i.e. saving data in formats that comply with these norms. More
information on SGML normed encoding is available from
http://www.uic.edu/orgs/tei. A very good package for formatting data in such a
forward-compatible way is Adobe Framemaker SGML, available for Mac, Windows
and UNIX.

I am not sure why you added the sentence about not believing anybody that data
migration was simple, easy and so on. I think none of us on the list suggested
that, nor did I. I did say in one of my last contributions to the list that
the digital library will have to have many new competences, and so will
digital librarians. It's going to be a new type of infrastructure. It's
clearly a major challenge, which is exactly why we felt we needed to add a
data archiving and migration section to our digitisation venture at
e-ternals.com. Apart from trying to be good digital publishers, we are trying
to demonstrate what a digital archive should be able to do. We benefit from
the fact that we don't have to apply for approval from any institutional
superiors. If we have a consensus here on technical issues, we can implement
them without having to compromise.

My main problem at the moment is getting certain microfilm formats converted
to digitial. There is a lot of valuable material on microfilm which is
physically decaying. We have some valuable material from Baroda here that
needs attention. Does anybody know of a state-of-the-art place where 35mm
microfilm material can be digitised without bankrupting the libraries and
museums we work for? Unfortunately, Kodak and Agfa don't make equipment for
35mm microfilm material, only for 16mm, and they don't offer the service. We
have found a way of doing the job, but it requires a complicated routine. We
are looking for somebody who can do it more efficiently.

Thanks for any help.
Yours,
Gunthard

gm at e-ternals.com



Dominik Wujastyk wrote:

> On Wed, 20 Dec 2000, Gunthard Mueller wrote:
>
> > What I personally envisage as feasible would be this kind of scenario.
>
> [description of migrating-on-demand of data from obsolete formats]
>
> In 1977/78 typed two chapters of the Kumarasambhava into machine-readable
> format.  I used an IBM card punch machine.  I also wrote lots of programs,
> and typed some other texts.
>
> I vividly remember running (literally) to the computer centre in Oxford in
> the late 1980s, when I heard that they were about to discard their last
> card-reader.  I managed to hand my shoe-boxes of cards in to the
> conversion service just days before they stopped accepting cards.  As it
> was, the main card reader had already been shut down, and my cards had to
> be partly entered by hand, and header-footer cards had to be punched with
> a hand stencil.
>
> The data I rescued from imminent loss is now on 5.25 floppies.  I cannot
> read them either now.
>
> I don't believe anybody who thinks data migration is simple, easy, or not
> a major problem.  Preserving computer data is a dynamic, costly process
> which requires pro-active management.
>
> Cf. http://www.clir.org/cpa/abstract/pub63.html
>
> --
> Dominik Wujastyk
> Founder, INDOLOGY list.