Gerard: What a nice way to let this decade go out. Simon and Garfunkel always make me smile. Out in my garage somewhere is a box of 35 mm slides I took during my Vietnam tour in 1967. Very cool. Buy the Kodachrome at the PX; shoot the roll; put it in a mailer marked "Free" and it went to the Kodak lab in Palo Alto on Page Mill Road and came back in about ten days. Gotta put that stuff on a DVD before it completely goes to hell (or me, whichever comes first). Keep up the good work in 2011. This decade, I'd like to finally put the boot to those peacenik losers who gave us a hard time back in the 60's.

Rich,

Scan those slides but don't toss them. Given the nature of the Kodachrome process, the slides will still be in fine shape long after all the bits have fallen off the DVD.

Rich—there are a number of companies who do scanning of photos and slides on a large scale. The cost depends on the handling process—I got 1000 4x6 photos scanned by ScanMyPhotos.com in three days there and back because they have auto-feed technology for those jobs, but they do non-auto stuff as well, and I know they're hardly the only game in town.

Since I've done a lot of scanning myself over the years*, I say paying someone else to do it is well worth the cost.

*I work for a photography studio, and occasionally we get restoration work. The most bizarre scan we ever had to do was a semi-transparent painted positive from the 1860s—we did a reflective scan and a transparency scan and did a combination of the two in order to get an accurate proof.

But scanning someone's photo album is tedious work. Mind-numbingly tedious.

Cris,

You've got a point. The Brits had a Domesday Project for the BBC Micro to document life in the 1980s, and merely two decades later they found they had to go through hoops reading the media and files. They had to build hardware to read the old laserdiscs, and then software to emulate the reader for the cryptic, poorly documented format burned on it.

But, but, but... (there's always a but, but, but...)

Of the corporations that had space in the WTC, the only ones that didn't have to start their intellectual assets from scratch after 9/11 were those that had kept digital backups on a remote server.

They say we'd never get to read the letters of Lawrence of Arabia (or give any other prolific letter-writer) if he'd committed it to electronic form only. My reply is "Interesting subject, why don't we discuss it over a copy of one of the manuscripts of the Alexandrian Library?"

Keep both. Keep the analog, scan to digital as well. Our bodies are analog, but our source code (DNA) is digital. Strengths and weaknesses.

Oh, before signing off I forgot another point about the Domesday Project. It was named for the Domesday Book, William the Conqueror's account as to how England was to be divided among his vassals.

Detractors of digital archives like to contrast the actual Domesday Book with the BBC Micro project I mentioned. It's still in pristine state, fully legible, in its museum glass case, they say. "In pristine state" I agree, but as for "fully legible," that's only if you know how to decode its text encoding: the Latin language. If not, it fares little better than the digital Domesday Project.

Apologies for rambling, now hopefully really signing off.

My slide of Gerhardt Berger in his Ferrari at Monza in 1988 is still the one I like the best. Had it printed 5x7 but nothing compares to that instant when it comes up on the screen. In a dark room.