By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:59:49 +0000

Just like the old adage that rightly proclaims that you can never step in the same river twice, it’s just as true, I suppose, for waterskiing atop lakes.
Heck, everything that concerns data is built to spill. In fact, the arrangement of the materials themselves was the result of “spilled data,” and this is precisely what helped recreate the master spreadsheet in the end. The same goes, of course, for the previous containers that were the filing cabinets and also the published (and reformatted) containers that are the magazine issues (and its microfilmed counterparts).
But I’m sure that we’ve all experienced setbacks due to data corruption, even with fancy RAID 5 setups. It’s great to hear, though, that the project didn’t end because of this!
In any event, this is a really interesting cautionary tale, Tammy, and I’m glad that you shared it and, in so doing, also brought attention to the collection.
If you’re interested, Nick Graham recently wrote a post for the North Carolina Digital Collections Collaboratory called Metadata Madness. Though it doesn’t deal directly with data loss, it does deal with data wrangling, which is very similar to data integrity, since it involves negotiating transfers between a variety of software, from Google Docs, MS Office, XML editors, etc. And — though people rarely consider this — it’s inevitable that the Excel file created for this project will need to be “wrangled” in the future (trust me: right now I’m creating a workflow to migrate some MS Word 6.0 documents, circa 1994, to TEI XML).
And finally, though “digital preservation” is much larger in scope, it’s nevertheless rooted in that same need to avoid bit rot, so if you’re interested you can check out and contribute to a “twine” of web resources that I’ve created around that very topic: [link was removed because it was no longer valid]
Thanks again for posting this story and these summertime pics.

Comments on: The Lake Norman Magazine Photograph Collection

By: Mark