Preserving Your Work
By Calvin Pruett, March 5, 2004
Both amateur and professional genealogists are going to find, to their horror, that their priceless information, stored on VHS, audio cassette, CD, DVD, floppies, ZIP, hard drives, magnetic tape, and yes, color photographs is already gone, or is going, or will be gone soon. All of this wondrous technology is crashing even as we speak.
Digital technology is unparalleled for research and manipulation. It has been a godsend. However, if one values the results, it must be saved via ancient media if one wants it to stick around awhile. I print everything of value. For text, I use a laser printer, ballpoint pens, and graphite pencils. For images, I use traditional silver emulsion technology to create prints from negatives. How boring! Color photographs or negatives can be copied using special Kodak technology (if you just take a b&w of a color image, certain blues of one value can appear to merge with certain reds, say, of the same value). The deal is this: You put a color photo negative in an enlarger and use a special Kodak paper to produce a b&w print. I don't expect most people to get too deep into this, but keep in mind that all color photographs and color inkjet prints are slowly dying and not so slowly dying from the day they are born. I have silver prints and negatives 100 years and older which are quite usable for copying. If you have color photos on the wall, get them down and into the readily available archival storage sleeves that snap into 3 ring binder systems. Do the same with your older, even more valuable b&w's. There are similar sleeves for every size negative. Display copies only. Label everything. I could go into great detail, but this should provide an impetus for further research for anyone who is interested.
Of course, everyone knows to back up their work on the computer. By all means! For those of you who have done so in triplicate and carefully stored your CDs in specially labeled containers for your grandchildren, don't be surprised if the whole lot is not worth a one pound bag of split peas in 50 years. The best way to preserve information is shockingly simple but somewhat repugnant to people who put a lot of effort into research: Cast it to the winds! Make it available. It will inevitably appear many decades later somewhere.
(Ed. Note. The author is the grandson of Teresa Grace Albro, readily traceable to John Albro I of Portsmouth.)
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Follow-up on Calvin Pruett's "Preserving Your Work"
Mr. Pruett's point is clear, straightforward, and correct. The information you have on floppy disks, hard drives, removable media such as ZIP disks, backup magnetic tape and the like can be expected to survive anywhere from five to fifteen years. Little by little, the Earth's magnetic field introduces "noise" until these media can no longer be read accurately. The life expectancies of CDs and DVDs depend on the type of media (much less for CD-RW, DVD-RW and DVD+RW than for CD-R and DVD-R, DVD+R, for example.) The archival quality of different CD/DVD brands and lines plays an important role also.
Those of you who keep paper copies of everything, with standard color prints of priceless genealogical photographs, may be a bit disappointed to know that standard printer inks, on standard copier paper, are probably good for 1-2 years before they may begin fading away. And not all handwritten documentation lasts centuries. I recall locating my great grandparents' marriage information in the official church record, noting that it was crumbling to dust at the edges. Sadly, the rector had determined that microfilming would not be allowed. I doubt if there is anything left of those records today.
Mr. Pruett is also quite correct that you can easily research the various technologies involved in long term data preservation. But one of the characteristics of genealogical research is that researchers can help each other avoid re-inventing the wheel, so I would like to share with you my own experience in this area, in the hope I can add a few suggestions to the excellent recommendations Mr. Pruett has provided in his article. I apologize if my comments are a bit chemistry oriented. I can't help it I'm a chemist! And I doubt if I will ever have my own laser printer.
The good news is, technology marches on. With the right paper, the right ink, and the right storage conditions, your color deskjet prints can last over 100 years. CD-ROM disks can last 200 years, good quality CD-R and DVD-R/DVD+R disks can last over a hundred years. CD-RW and DVD-RW/DVD+RW disks are less persistent, lasting perhaps 25 years. Your personal notebooks, made using suitable paper and ink, can indeed last for centuries, with proper storage. It is going to come down to the same thing that tends to determine quality in everything – are you willing to go to the trouble and expense to ensure your records will survive? If not, you may as well stop reading now. I should point out that I take Mr. Pruett's key piece of advice though in a slightly less vigorous fashion – I send copies of my database files as gedcoms to all of my children every few months. I also send them to the few people I believe truly understand what the words "personal", "private", and "under active research" mean. The more (protected) copies I can distribute, the lower the chance they will all disappear or rot. I also tend to believe that if no one wants to reproduce my documents in the next 100 years, they probably weren't worth preserving in the first place.
First, ten years ago I would have recommended using a "magic marker" to seal the edges of CDs so they would last longer. Modern CDs come already sealed. Incidentally, don't stick adhesive labels on archival CDs. The glue can cause problems. Use an indelible felt-tip marker designed for that purpose. For a summary of just about everything known about the preservation of CDs and DVDs it would be hard to beat a 50-page document provided by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (the outgrowth of the old National Bureau of Standards). You can find a downloadable (.pdf) version of the document at: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/carefordisc/CDandDVDCareandHandlingGuide.pdf. For a one page summary of how you should handle CDs and DVDs for maximum lifetime, see:
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/carefordisc/disccare.html.
Where paper is concerned, there are two bad guys to avoid – acid and lignin. The most common process for making paper from pulp involves treatment with acid. The resulting paper is acidic and slowly decomposes, turning brittle and eventually crumbling. Lignin in paper is what causes it to turn yellow with age. There are processes for making paper that avoid acid and eliminate lignin, but as you might expect, the paper is presently much more expensive (but see:
http://www.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/acidfree.html). Nonetheless, being willing to spend $2.00 for an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of matte photo quality paper may let you keep a color print 100 years without fading! To do so, you will need to use printer inks that obtain their colors from pigments rather than dyes (by and large, most good quality printer ink is acid-free.) All dyes fade with time. In fact, it is the fading of the internal dye layer that determines the life expectancy of a CD-R disk! I have obtained acid-free, lignin-free, archival grade printer and notebook paper from several sources, as has Mr. Pruett – his email to me mentioned two sources, Light Impressions and the Avery Company. I have used several papers I won't name because I wouldn't buy them again, but have been quite happy with Arches Infinity, Lumijet (several kinds), and Somerset Velvet paper for archival color prints. There are, of course, many other brands you could choose. I suggest you go to:
http://www.inkjetart.com/news/epson_archival/bigimages/wilhelm_test.gif to see comparisons of a wide range of paper brands tested for longevity by Wilhelm Imaging Research, Inc. I have been using Epson's archival inkjet inks for some time now, and considering the chemistry involved, would expect the MediaStreet "Generations" series of 100% pigment based inkjet inks to be suitable as well. Maybe my great grandchildren will post something here in 100 years so we'll know how the inks did! Epson advertises a life expectancy exceeding 80 years if the prints are stored in protective sleeves out of excessive light.
This article sounds like a big advertisement. It isn't intended to be. Mention of the brands named here indicates nothing other than the fact that the author has used them, undoubtedly unknown to their manufacturers! I have no doubt there are other brands every bit as good, maybe better.
O.K., that was the good news part. Now the bad news. It is very possible that there will be no devices available 100, 200, whatever, years from now that can read the CDs and DVDs of today! I don't believe anyone living today can imagine how data will be stored 50 years from now, let alone 100. Whatever we can imagine, will be built by 20 years from now! So the real issue will be, how can we retrieve the data on CDs or DVDs, even if they have survived perfectly! There is no certain answer. The best system would be to keep transferring your data to each new type of data storage medium as it becomes available. There is, of course, the possibility that the world will acquire a value for preserving access to knowledge, and will continue to make data access equipment "backward compatible" for centuries. Well, maybe. Just in case that happens, there are some data formats likely to remain readable longer than others, so you are advised to use them. Don't store your archived genealogy data in a software-dependent format. That software will probably not exist in 100 years. Do store data as ASCII text, .pdf format, XML, gedcom, and Rich Text Format. Picture files should be stored as PNG, TIFF or JPEG formats, as most others are proprietary. Sound files may be safest in MP3, WAV and AIFF formats. Why these formats? Because they are widely accepted, open-code, standard formats for which converters can easily be written to move what they represent into whatever formats become popular in the future. One hopes the average person will still be able to read English for the foreseeable future! You can find additional discussion of this point at: http://peripherals.about.com/library/weekly/aa041701a.htm.
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