Re: Archiving very old paper diagrams, drawings and text

The arguments are interesting, but essentially nothing will last
indefinitely unless you look after it.

There is no magic longer life to analogue media: many historic early films
are just turning into crud and it is too late to save them all, it is a race
for cash and time to copy the most valuable ones onto new media. Ditto for
magnetic tape, 3M made lots of tape that they said would last a certain
number of years but didn't. Now they have a big legal fight with people who
recorded irreplaceable stuff on tape where the magnetic oxide is coming off.
Compensation is difficult, no amount of money can replace some things.


>From a practical point of view, it is easier to deal with digital data.
Maintaining readable copies is easier and faster and does not introduce
analogue transcription errors. And the data files are a lot more convenient
for sharing across the web.

I recently saw a software package that can read scanned technical drawings
and create CAD files from them. These are much smaller, and better quality
than the originals. It is OCR for technical drawings. Various companies use
it to convert their old blueprints into a more useful form.

Can't recall the name, but there seem many companies doing this kind of
software.



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