Long-term image archival

Fenster

Call it my pondering my mortality, but recently I've given thought to the problem of long-term storage of our images. True 'long-term'. I do not refer to just a year, a decade, or even the lifetime of the photographer, but instead to the multi-millennia storage of an image, along with attached contextual information in a robust format that will be easily accessible and clearly understood without transcription to another language or media.

I first dug into this line over Christmas when I read the science fiction novel Anathem [1] by Neal Stephenson. One of the themes in the novel is the storage and accessibility of information over the course of approximately four thousand years. After finishing the novel I started reading about the Dead Sea Scrolls [2], the Clock of the Long Now [3], the difficulties of translation in general and the merits of different storage media.

I kept my concerns strictly to photography. To break them down into points:

1. In what media could a single photograph be encoded or printed that will not appreciably lose fidelity over a period of at least one thousand years?
2. How can we attach associated contextual information in a format that can be readily accessed through to the end of the period of one thousand years?
3. Related to the above--how do we decide what contextual information is appropriate? I do not necessarily refer to who took the image, but the why: Who are the characters present? Why is this event/place/person significant enough to be archived? Where do we draw a practical limit on related information? In short, how do we ensure that the significance of the image is unmistakably understood one thousand years from now?
4. Where should this image be stored? Taking a longer-term view of our species and world, there is almost no inhabited place on Earth that goes more than a few centuries without experiencing climatic or social upheaval.
5. Who should be made caretaker of these images?

I'm going to throw out all of these questions for answering because it is a slow Wednesday night and I have to sort junk for selling. For the sake of any argument, the only rule I am going to lay down is the exclusion of any electronic format. Some numbers I have seen pop up in discussions for the lifetime of a given hard disk 2-5 years and 5-100 years for a DVDR. In addition to their inherently short lifespan and fragility (mishandling and environment will destroy a hard disk before it will destroy a vellum scroll) a society a level of technology equaling or exceeding our own is required to back-engineer the formats and create an adapter capable of accessing the contents.

Ghost Train

1.Plastic or titanium or some alloy. Sort of like coins, you could have pressed plates, split the image into its red, green and blue parts and have a plate for each so that the picture could be reconstructed
2.Its analog picture form, so simple diagrams could be included
3.Include a map of the world and an arrow pointing to where and a picture of who etc
4.On the moon or in an air tight box buried under something solid
5.Some angry swans

oshead

Fenster wrote: »

In what media could a single photograph be encoded or printed that will not appreciably lose fidelity over a period of at least one thousand years?

Uh.... Do i really want to try and answer this. One thing I can say is this. To not loose fedelity over such a long period of time, you'd need some sort of self replicating system. An organism which uses a binary. :pac: It could be living, though i'd guess, probably nano robots at its base using RNA as its vehicle for replication.

Fenster

oshead wrote: »

Uh.... Do i really want to try and answer this. One thing I can say is this. To not loose fedelity over such a long period of time, you'd need some sort of self replicating system. An organism which uses a binary. :pac: It could be living, though i'd guess, probably nano robots at its base using RNA as its vehicle for replication.

Vellum

I want to avoid highly technological solutions simply because they are inherently fragile.

Ciaran500

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

Something like this?

Fenster

Ciaran500 wrote: »

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

Something like this?

No. The Pioneer plaque was a Galactic 'yoo hoo, here we are!' I simply want to preserve knowledge in an accessible format.

charybdis

Why would you discard any sort of system involving the electronic retrieval of information? If done properly, a system of electronic retrieval eliminates the problem of the impossibility of duplication and successful duplication and adaptation, as Darwin has taught us, is the key to long-term survival.

Fenster

charybdis wrote: »

Why would you discard any sort of system involving the electronic retrieval of information? If done properly, a system of electronic retrieval eliminates the problem of the impossibility of duplication and successful duplication and adaptation, as Darwin has taught us, is the key to long-term survival.

Fragility and durability. Electronic equipment is more vulnerable to extremes of climate, mishandling and events like electromagnetic pulses. To have access to and the capability to operate such equipment implies the ability to access the technological know-how of an advanced society. Three of the implications from my post that I should have made clearer were:

There might not be a technologically-advanced society.
Obsolescence of formats. Linky
Society as a whole might not approve of the stored information for political and religious reasons. rm -r ./*

Ghost Train had the excellent idea of separate plates for each color channel.

CabanSail

If we take a look back in history & learn from the past then Cave Paintings have the runs on the board.

Slightly more practical & more easily transported is Vellum which is still in use for long term archival purposes.

kumate_champ07

Fenster wrote: »

No. The Pioneer plaque was a Galactic 'yoo hoo, here we are!' I simply want to preserve knowledge in an accessible format.

will the human race live long enough to settle on different planets before we wipe each other out/the sun expires, that is the question

or 'what if' there comes a time when all technology/modern infrastructures cease to exist and life becomes basic ie the need for food and shelter. no computers,internet or gasoline. communites will be rebuilt, entertainment will be provided by acoustic instruments/theatre. science records will be lost, modern music archives will be lost. which songs will be remembered and passed along to the next generation?
photography will be forgotten unless drawn/painted from memory and archived again

Simplicius

shoot film.... you can still enjoy your prints in a power cut under natural light... and negatives are still surviving strong after some 140 or so years.....:D

kumate_champ07

charybdis wrote: »

Why would you discard any sort of system involving the electronic retrieval of information? If done properly, a system of electronic retrieval eliminates the problem of the impossibility of duplication and successful duplication and adaptation, as Darwin has taught us, is the key to long-term survival.

over a very large time the duplication process will have made something completely different to the original, like a global game of chinese whispers

Fenster

kumate_champ07 wrote: »

will the human race live long enough to settle on different planets before we wipe each other out/the sun expires, that is the question

or 'what if' there comes a time when all technology/modern infrastructures cease to exist and life becomes basic ie the need for food and shelter. no computers,internet or gasoline. communites will be rebuilt, entertainment will be provided by acoustic instruments/theatre. science records will be lost, modern music archives will be lost. which songs will be remembered and passed along to the next generation?
photography will be forgotten unless drawn/painted from memory and archived again

I don't believe that photographic technology will become entirely extinct. Beyond the film, which is a product of almost two centuries of scientific research, a pinhole camera can be made with almost any local material you care to name. Now if we disseminated the know-how of creating photo-sensitive film from scratch...

Promac

The next big thing in data storage is diamond-like carbon. They're talking about 1 terabyte/square inch. And because carbon materials are so durable it'll also be very long-term.

Edit: As a demonstration of durability, from wikipedia:

wrote:

Peer-reviewed research published in scholarly journals has established that the increases in lifetimes of articles coated with DLC that wear out because of abrasion can be described by the formula f = (g)µ, where g is a number that characterizes the type of DLC, the type of abrasion, the substrate material and μ is the thickness of the DLC coating in μm.[7] For "low-impact" abrasion (pistons in cylinders, impellers in pumps for sandy liquids, etc.), g for pure ta-C on 304 stainless steel is 66. This means that one-μm thickness (that is ~5% of the thickness of a human hair-end) would increase service lifetime for the article it coated from a week to over a year and two-μm thickness would increase it from a week to 85 years. These are measured values; though in the case of the 2 μm coating the lifetime was extrapolated from the last time the sample was evaluated until the testing apparatus itself wore out.

Fenster

Promac wrote: »

The next big thing in data storage is diamond-like carbon. They're talking about 1 terabyte/square inch. And because carbon materials are so durable it'll also be very long-term.

Durable, but how are you going to access it if your level of technology is somewhere around seventeenth century Europe?

Promac

Fenster wrote: »

Durable, but how are you going to access it if your level of technology is somewhere around seventeenth century Europe?

Text can be printed and coated in it. Same with pictures.

ianflynn

simple. laminating paper. sorted

Ghost Train

ianflynn wrote: »

simple. laminating paper. sorted

apparently not a good idea even for short term archiving, mainly due to it being unable to be reversed

http://www.everything.com/FTMPreserving-Memories-9/

ianflynn

why would you want to reverse it? you want it to last a long time...
laminated, in an airtight container, buried in a time capsule type way.
just look at all the stuff they have found in the valley of the kings, unless im mistaken, some of that has lasted 5000 years? canopic jars etc...

Ghost Train

ianflynn wrote: »

why would you want to reverse it? you want it to last a long time...
laminated, in an airtight container, buried in a time capsule type way.
just look at all the stuff they have found in the valley of the kings, unless im mistaken, some of that has lasted 5000 years? canopic jars etc...

I suppose if it starts to degrade you can do something about it, I would have thought the same about laminating being a good system, but maybe you can get a similar effect like cd/dvd rot. I guess a lot would come down to storage conditions if you want to be sure something lasts

Slidinginfinity

Once you take the, "can it be used by cavemen?" aspect out of this thought experiment, I think some thing like this would be a solution.