Abstract
Many museums and other archives worldwide are digitising their collections. However, it does not follow that the digitised data files are likely to survive any longer than the artefact that has been copied. Curators have centuries of experience in the conservation of paper and pigments, but there are many unpredictable factors in the preservation of digital archives, which implies digital storage and data migration hundreds of years into the future. This chapter explores an alternative proposal to archive vital images and documents as hard copy inkjet prints. We suggest that this will increase their chances of survival into the twenty-third century. We are not advocating this method in place of digital materials, but rather as a sound form of insurance, based on existing well-known methods of the conservation of acid free paper and pigments.
This chapter is an updated and extended version of the following paper, published here with kind permission of the Chartered Institute for IT (BCS) and of EVA London Conferences: G. Diprose and M. Seaborne, “An Alternative Approach to Conserving Digital Images into the 23rd Century.” In S. Dunn, J. P. Bowen, and K. Ng (eds.). EVA London 2011 Conference Proceedings. Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC), British Computer Society, 2011. http://www.bcs.org/ewic/eva2011 (accessed 26 May 2013).
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the following for their support or sponsorship: Hewlett Packard for the long term loan of an HP Z3100, 12 Pigment Ink 24” wide printer; Fujifilm UK, Ilford Harman, Felix Schoeller, for supplying test sample and paper for the projects; Canson Paper Company for supplying paper for our pilot project and further research; The National Monuments Record, English Heritage, for allowing us to use the digital image files from Henry Taunt’s original prints for our research; The Museum of London, for allowing us to make digital copies and then use these image files from their PLA collection for our research.
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Diprose, G., Seaborne, M. (2013). Back to Paper? An Alternative Approach to Conserving Digital Images into the Twenty-Third Century. In: Bowen, J., Keene, S., Ng, K. (eds) Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5406-8_5
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