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[Jules Richardson]

Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
> Jules Richardson wrote:
> 
>> I suppose it's one of those situations where you end up throwing away 
>> information no matter what (after all, any scan is essentially a 
>> digital representation of analogue data), but there's a danger of 
>> throwing away too much data - and for rare docs you might only get the 
>> chance to scan them once. For rare items I'd rather have maximum 
>> quality "just in case", even if it does mean more storage space.
> 
> Exactly.  Storage is incredibly cheap these days.  It's easy to throw 
> disk space at a problem.

Oh, I don't think it's *that* easy quite yet - think of something like 
bitsavers if it suddenly needed a 10x increase in storage and bandwidth :-) 
But I do think it's possible for 'special cases' where there may only be a 
handful of surviving printed copies left in the world.

So far as I'm aware it's not an issue that any of the big institutions are 
thinking about though as (rightly so) the goal in recent years has just been 
to preserve the text for human readability rather than addressing quality 
issues. Better to do something than nothing at all, and all that. Things are 
probably at a stage now where the recommendations for special cases can be 
different, though [1].

[1] Docs from the 50s and early 60s are often good candidates - typically 
they're bound in something other than paper/card, printed on very off-white 
paper, and by now are getting rather dirty. A typical bi-level scan not only 
loses the spirit of the original somehow, but introduces major headaches for 
subsequent OCR (like OCR isn't enough of a headache already!)

> If you had to fit all the scans onto RL02 packs, I'd see your problem...

:-) What's the transfer rate for a typical RL02 drive? I suspect that just 
getting the data on and off would be a problem, even if you had enough of them 
to meet capacity...

(there's a fun calculation - what would the power consumption of the bitsavers 
  archive be if it was held on RL02 packs?)


cheers

Jules