Cripes people, she's not arguing against digitizing *anything*. She's pointing out why there's no serious attempt to digitize *everything*. The reasoning is not that hard to follow here. 1 - "Everything" is a staggeringly big number. The Archive doesn't even attempt to estimate how many pages are in its collection, as far as I can see - they typically measure it by the cubic meter. The collection stretches back 800 years and requires about 5km (over 3 miles) of shelving to store it all. 2 - Preserving the original documents is the primary job here, and that job is not going away, ever. A digital copy is simply not a good enough replacement. Remember that to a historian, the physical properties of a document may hold more useful information than its written contents. 3 - Digitization is not a fire-and-forget process. To be done properly you must consider what format the documents will be stored in and at what level of resolution, what kind of media to store them on, how to index them in such a way that they're readily retrievable, and then you must continue to maintain that infrastructure, ensuring that the documents remain accessible. I see a lot of people suggesting the speaker doesn't understand technology. I cannot comment on her actual level of expertise, but if you think it's just a problem of finding the right kind of scanner, I suspect that your understanding's a hell of a lot shallower than hers. Given all of the above, it simply makes more sense for them to use their limited budget to focus on what they've been doing successfully for over a century now. She doesn't mention this in the video, but the Archive does in fact have an ongoing digitization project as part of their document preservation program - but given budgetary constraints and the extreme care with which many of the documents must be handled, they must be selective about what makes the cut. Over the last year, five of the Archive's more significant collections were digitized and are in the process of being made available online. Again, it's difficult to estimate, but based on a look at their collection catalog, this is probably not even a full 1% of their inventory.
The keyword here is "everything". She talks a lot about the cost and time it would take to digitize these things, which wouldn't be a problem if there wasn't much to digitize, but there's a *huge* amount of documents. So many that it would be practically impossible to digitize all, or even most of them.
I dabbled in digitization with my university library for several months. I had no idea of how difficult the task of creating, storing, and managing a digital archive of the scale of a 100 year old library. I can't even imagine the task of digitization of the documents of a nation with 1000 years or more of documents.
The archive has a very limited budget so simply cannot afford to digitise everything. Some of the more fragile items have been digitised and are online. This helps with the prime objective of the archive which is to preserve the documents. The catalogue for this archive is also online & is very helpful when it comes to planning a visit. IT technology changes so fast that digitising is not a panacea. Just look at photos. I have glass slides dating back from before WW1 that are still readable and ZIP discs dating back 15 years which are not.
Floppy discs are outdated tech my guy. Stuff on solid state drives will last a long time, plus, there's cloud storage. The issue with material items like this, is that they can be lost in wars/fires. SO much history has been lost to fires and stuff, and people realise this, which is why archives quite literally are being digitised... Just slowly.
thank the good lord you exist. I agree whole heartedly with your views. case in point. I have all my baby scans on 3inch floppy discs, and now I have nothing to view them on. thank God I have the originals. I'm all for the Internet and all its info and use it most days but there is an awful lot to be said for the excitement of holding a historical book. the smell alone is wonderful. and then there's knowing that someone produced it by hand. what we're they thinking and feeling?
Why not both? When you digitise something, you don't have to get rid of the originals. But it would vastly improve the accessibility of the documents. If they are all stored in an archive - who's gonna look at them? Should history be restricted to those, that have the time to go to archives? That seems pretty bad to me. And concerning your floppy-discs with the baby photos: The reason you can't view them anymore is because you neither kept your floppy-drive, nor did you transfer the pictures to another medium. So that's not a valid excuse. And nowadays transfering data to a different medium is even easier, than it was back then. You can have a high-resolution picture on your phone, TV and computer, that is far crisper, than a printed photo could ever be.
Lmao your baby scans... "I forgot to update my data storage to more modern standards for years and years despite having all the time in the world to do so, technology is so unreliable!"
If they're on floppy you're better off just buying a scanner and just rescanning at a higher resolution. Or hell your phone's probably good enough for archiving honestly. We have a bunch of 35mm scans my grandma took, I did an initial scan on this film scanner, popped out her old projection scanner and projected those and took higher quality scans on a blackout cloth and it's night and day. If your going to do something, do it right.
Not backing them up on modern tech was the mistake here, _not_ having them on floppy discs. This comment is 7 years old, but even then, floppy discs were _very_ outdated. Should have been backed up on an SSD drive, a micro SD, and a cloud.
It would be interesting to have more of these videos about the issues facing the Bedfordshire archives, and what’s involved in looking after 000s of artefacts of cultural heritage.
What was meant exactly at 2:08 with regards to copyright? Who might be a copyright owner when it comes to historical documents? I'm not disputing the claims, just looking for it to be clarified
One needs to only research the National Personnel Archives Fire to see the importance of some sort of back up, or the very least, proper planning. Many, many people's military service records were lost which caused numerous veterans to go without proper pension, compensation, or access to medical care.
Valid points. That is why archivists are such dedicated people. I may add the following... just as in history "selective" recording of history is done, I pretty sure "selective" digitizing is also done. Imagine the history lost during WWII, or the history lost by invasions as happening right now or in Mongolia and China in the 50's and 60's. On the other hand I do appreciate digital records I can access from across the world, as I cannot afford to visit these wonderful places.
just thought of something, why don't all of the folks on here who are getting agitated by her not digitising, offer your services to do the work, for free. then you can climb down off your soap box and feel good about yourself.
Most Satisfied wow talk about completely oblivious to the challenges archivists face. Archives are chronically underfunded and yet are constantly expected to do more with less. People want to point fingers and make demands without even knowing how archives compete for grant funding and donations to fund digitization projects and the fact that digitized assets must be monitored far more closely than physical materials. It’s not just scanning! It’s the metadata upkeep, planning for obsolescence, migrating data and things like checksums
I could happily listen to this lady speak on any subject, whether or not I know anything about the topic, or agree with the content... Your Service Manager simply has a wonderful voice.
I suppose it would have been quite a long, labourious task to transcribe the entire Library of Alexandria or the House of Wisdom at Baghdad - but would anyone question the value of such an enormous task today, now that what they contained has been entirely destroyed? An imperfect copy is better than nothing. An incomplete record is better than a perfect blank. I hope at least what is unique in the collection is being prioritized for digitization...?
They would likely not have finished making backups of everything in the Library of Alexandria before it was lost. Then there's the question of where to put it all (obviously off-site). It's an impossible task to ask of anyone.
The issue is the mediums we have aren't guaranteed for any sort of long term use. No one makes flash storage that is immune from breaking down. Unless it's a dedicated lto storage system, but tapes don't last forever. Blu rays would be my second rec but that's even worse since most people don't have one in their computer. Dvds are more common but like cd it's only a matter of time till people stop making them. Maybe CDs won't ever die, which would be great but their too damn small.
My dad runs an archive company. He says if we digitize everything without paper backups we become exponentially more likely to eventually lose them. EMPs, general electromagnetic interference...
One fire and it's all gone. Not digitizing everything puts the records at risk. You don't need to release them to the public, just keep them on hard drives or something. It's pretty easy to get Terabyte HDD. The SATA standard has been the standard for years and years, there will always be a way to use it
Are you *possibly* suggesting that the hardware that would be used in this instance would be on the same level as an industrial scanner used, or even lent by a university which has an interest in preserving the stored material, would share ANY problems associated with conventional scanners? There are machines which can copy the entire contents of commercial textbooks and convert them to PDF formats. You think these century-old papers on Jstor are just popped onto a consumer-grade Brother printer and scanned? No. Modern archiving technology is faaaar beyond that.
People fetishize digital as if it’s so secure. The cloud and digital are not intangibles floating in the air. It all is very much physical whether at a data center or on your drive. It’s also physically vulnerable and why like archives, data centers have crazy security. One fire and it was also all be gone. And it’s even more at risk of fire because the servers in data centers generate sooo much heat. A lot of data centers energy is spent on just cooling down servers.
While i totally understand the fear of people losing interest in physical media, what you're archiving is just that, media. Media which one could decide whether or not to share because it's archived. The neat thing about digitization is that it's easier to keep track of. There are so many pieces of lost media found because of online archives. And because of online archives, millions of people can create their own personal archives. We become each others archives in a sense. A digital file is just as delicate as a physical piece no doubt, as an artist of both mediums i've lost plenty of my work. But I take solace in knowing that if I don't have it, someone else does, as opposed to a physical piece, which I can't reproduce and faces higher chance of deterioration. Also format converters exist. Just because YOU don't have an operative machine to do so doesn't mean no one else does.
I'm glad this archive is totally protected against any disaster, man made or natural, but for every other archive out there, the cost and difficulty is an argument for more and better digitization rather than not bothering. We still have copies of some small portion of what was at the library of Alexandria. How much could be preserved if every great archive maintained a backup of every other archive, that can't be done on physical copies anymore so digital representations are the only choice. Sure, if ubiquitous nanotechnology is available we could make physical copies but unless that happens having a digital copy of the physical artifacts, and the ability to work from both is by far the safest option.
You have a very relaxing speech pattern. It would be wonderful if you made more videos of yourself talking about your job. Some topics could include the challenges you face, daily tasks, what qualifies as a piece of heritage worth archiving etc etc.. In any case, even if you don't, thank you for making this video.
Without digital access, nobody will ever look at 99% of those documents ever again. The vast majority of the public will never visit an archive but everyone is on the internet. What's the point of historical documents if not to be studied and appreciated? Long-term digital storage is definitely a field of study and is far from an unsolved problem. By not digitizing, you're putting every single one of those documents at risk.
Half of what i heard was complaining about how time consuming it would be. Keep in mind, tho, that a work she was complaining is something a non-digitally-skilled person could do. And also, the documents are going to stay there for (i quote) centuries. The archive's got time. It's not going anywhere. Better to begin to do the relatively cheap things, no?
A lot of the more important documents that people will want to see are often digitized, though. But it's insane to expect everything to be put up online with such limited funds available.
I understand her point of view. But the argument could be made in the reverse as well. You need people, money, space, time and equiment to maintain physical documents. And then there's the potential of those documents being destroyed forever. Digitizing is a monumental task, but well worth it. I'd rather have multiple ways and sources of viewing said document. Instead of one, which takes time, money, and people just to retrieve and view it. Can all of it be digitized? Of course not, but trying is better than letting it possibly be lost from history for good.
I guess the scale of large academic libraries and archives is too difficult to understand unless one has worked in one. You somehow aren’t getting the fulness of this, and that is exactly why this lady dreads the question.
We should dread this as well - Contemplate this as a counterexample - time and money here but also a lengthy (in some many cases infinite) interruption in research th-cam.com/video/Ip6698z_QmY/w-d-xo.html The Restoration of Books: Florence - 1968 BookbindersWorkshop
The original documents would still have to be looked after post-digitization. Maintaining the digital copies would just be added work. Certainly it is feasible for some documents, but not all.
I've heard the "but is now obsolete, so there's no point" argument so many times and it's nonsense. How about moving with the times? All my photographs are on multiple hard disks. When the time comes and hard disks are facing extinction, I'll transfer them to the new medium. That's the easy bit! The hard (laborious) bit was getting them into the digital domain to start with.
It's one thing juggling your hard disks now, but in terms of very long-term low-maintenance archival storage we don't have it available yet. Maybe one day, not yet.
She refers to digitized documents as "images" however with text recogniziton technology these images can be converted in to information which can be stored, manipulated and displayed very easily. Also, there's very inexpensive technology available to get the images required for tdoing this. It need not be a supremely quality image, but just enough for the recogniztion software to do its job. This would preserve the documents information for all time.
Simple! Problem solved, then. The experts are idiots. This is my most pet of peeves-someone strolls in and solves all the problems in 10 seconds that the people trying to solve the problem for decades already have unable to. This thought process is why there is an orange president in the White House.
@@RichardHandal301 nope ur completely wrong. The experts are usually stuck in their ways- like you are. When someone with a better understanding comes along they refuse to give way. Sit down and shut up. The orange man was in the White House beside people wanted change
While I can appreciate your points regarding digitization and it's myriad number of difficulties, I can't help but think about the demise of the famous Library of Alexandra. The one argument that trumps all the cost and tedious processing is retention and preservation of the information it's self. At least some drunk Roman couldn't come along, pass out, drop his torch and destroy it for all time. We'll never know what incredible literary treasures were lost in that tragedy. By all means, please continue to save the physical originals, don't worry about making the digital version accessible, keep it on solid state drives in a lunar vault or something, just don't let catastrophe determine the fate of the information. We don't write things down because we like the way the storage medium looks, smells or feels after a hundred years. The thoughts, data, history is what matters, right?
Please archivist lady, could you start reading audiobooks as a side job 😊. Also start an ASMR channel called *ASMR archivist* doing quiet tours on those basements with only you softly explaing stuff and reading some old nice documents. Millions would enjoy.
Her last point.... is her entire point. If they digitize, then they may lose control of where the funding comes from and to whom the funding goes to. Sounds like there is an opportunity for a web business to make some money providing these documents in digital form. The entities who need to reference these documents will gladly pay a small fee for the ease of access that these dusty old state funded institutions are unwilling to provide.
I don’t trust technology to be honest! If I’ve created an important document for my boss then I’ll always save it in multiple places as well as print it off, if the document has been wiped from my computer somehow then I’ll always have a hard printed copy as a last resort.
Instead of saving material for preservation? They want to horde everything with mold and risk the possibility of a fire? Wand scanners are a much better alternative than a fire
all i heard was pragmatic explanation of why actual digitizing efforts are limited in scope relative to available source material. not that no digitization should happen.
A fire would destroy the digital backups too. And archivists take special care not to let documents go moldy, why would you even suggest they wouldn't?
It's B.C. 48. Two librarians overlook the smoldering ashes of the Library of Alexandria* "Boy, I sure am glad we don't have any digital documentation for any of that junk." "Heard that. WAY too expensive."
And where would they have kept the hard drives, flash drives, or servers for storing those backups? In the Library, I take it? Oops, look at that, still burned with everything else.
No. Its not arguing that nothing should be digitised, just that everything shouldn't be digitised because of... Well all of the reasons she listed in this video (I'm too lazy to type it all out).
I can totally understand not WANTING to digitize it all but it should be done. In an effort to preserve the unpreservable. Yes lets hope all of these fabulous documents don't eventually turn to dust. I get it. But for heaven sakes lets not throw the baby out with the bath water. If there is a means to have at least a passable "Representation" of the document. It should be done.
This didn't age well, because pretty much everything is being digitised bit by bit, and eventually, it will. Not everything, but it'll be a gradual process, seeing as new things are always being added. Also, the help of AI will make the job much easier in time, most likely. Sure, there's a lot of stuff to digitise, but even more has been lost to history in wars and fires, which makes it alll the more important to digitise. Digitised information is practically immortalised as long as the infrastructure remains up and healthy, and even then, x amount of backups can be made. Digitising things, is, I'd argue, more important than keeping all these bits of paper to begin with, because materials will always perish eventually. Sure, something like a solar flare could render it all gone, along with most other info, but, something like that happening, even in the next multiple generations, is very unlikely. Keeping the hard copies is still important, but, yeah, stuff like this is literally being digitised as we speak. This lady talks as if it's an impossible task, but it's not, it's just something that will be taking place for a long time. The rate at which tech is growing is insane and costs are getting much cheaper due to it.
What if there is a fire, an act of terrorism or a war, for example, and they are destroyed forever. It would be a prodigious loss to the world if these irreplaceable, historical records were to be lost forever. Also, there is the second law of thermodynamics, which invariably has inexorable, deleterious consequences on everything, known as entropy. I would at least consider some kind of back up. 😊😊
She didn’t say not to digitize anything, she’s explaining why one doesn’t and can’t practically digitize everything and keep only the digital copy. Watch the video again, and don’t conveniently ignore the troublesome portions next time.
Richard Handal she states the question she dreads the most is, "aren't you going to digitize it all? The answer is no." This is the negative response I commented on. She does implicitly state it is possible to digitize everything. However, she then laboriously explains due to costs, manpower and the multitudinous files that would need to be digitised, it would be impractical to do so. I just feel it would be more prudent, notwithstanding the cost, time and manpower, to perpetuate these important historical records. My best intentions are in my first comment and I have the highest respect for this lady. She obviously adores her work. 😊😊
Until majorities of elected officials consist of more librarians and archivists than lawyers, money for such conceptual niceties is not going to be allocated for them. People rather have healthcare, no potholes, and whiter teeth than court records preserved from 300 years ago. Meanwhile, unique recordings of indigenous tribes of Brazil went up in flames two days ago and are lost forever. This is the state of the world.
Richard Handal I agree. I look forward to a time when a balance has been achieved. Health care, dental care, world peace, homelessness and many more similarly important issues need to be of the highest priority. However, these documents are our history and history can be the greatest teacher. When we have the opportunity to study, and learn the ups and downs of history; we can be more perceptive of which paths to take and which ones to avoid. World wars 1 and 2 to be avoided, but band aid, live aid etcetera are good paths to walk. If that history was some how lost, we might end up making similar mistakes. You seem like a sagacious person, so you understand. Most records are left for prosperity for our progeny, they are a guide, markers to avoid catastrophic mistakes made by their ancestors, us. With these records perpetual and prevalent humanity might just do fine. 😊😊
I used to work in curitorial at the Library of Congress, and I follow politics closely. Were I king, I’d appoint armies of people to train as preservationists. I don’t think my priorities are in sync with the zeitgeist.
"A didital image produced online is often black and white and not very detailed. This allows it to load quickly." What?..... Maybe 20 years ago... We have 4k monitors and Gigabit-internet now. Hell, even phones have HD-screens. While it's true, that the original document can give you some information like texture and material - I doubt, that that information will be relevant most of the times. I take easy storage, easy reproduction and easy accessibility over that any time. Just imagine if all the ancient libraries and archives had digitised their things. We would still have access to their wealth. Also not everybody can just take a plane and fly all over the place just to visit an archive.... Your view seems to be very narrow minded and is actually hurting everything you're archiving. Because nobody will read it.
I agreed mostly, except for the part about making the digital assets "keep up" with technology. This is clearly an assertion from someone who isn't technology savvy. Binary is binary.
I want to use many thirsty adjectives for this but I can't. I wish youngsters aspired to speak in this very British way. American slang, spelling and grammar is taking over the vernacular.
I like this channel but this video is just stupid. Digitizing may be a lot of work but it makes preserving the archives much easier. I feel like she doesn't understand how digital copies work.
Wow... Talk about being stuck in the past and refusing to acknowledge the benefits of modern archiving. The whole "its very difficult and time consuming, so we're not gonna bother" - attitude is just pathetic. Slowing down progress won't stop progress, it'll just irritate the people actually needs access to the contents of the documents. Images could easily be in colour, all information about the documents storage locations through time, author, material type, smell, dimensions.. Etc., could be added as meta data, and therefore become searchable. That means you could search for a document written on animal hide, stored at a specific location at a specific point in time. Then, within seconds, get a series of high resolution images of said documents, with all the meta data attached. Or how about this: search for a location only, then get all documents ever stored there. Add a dynamic timeline, and you can scroll through time to see what was stored when. The possibilities are endless. You are only holding back progress momentarily, eventually it will all be digitised.
A high elf if ever ive seen one
Christ 😂
The Thalmor have seized the archives
😄 yes! She is lovely enough and those high cheek bones
One of the funniest things I’ve read on the internet in my life
She does have that glassy look to her eyes like she just smoked a fatty beforehand
Cripes people, she's not arguing against digitizing *anything*. She's pointing out why there's no serious attempt to digitize *everything*. The reasoning is not that hard to follow here.
1 - "Everything" is a staggeringly big number. The Archive doesn't even attempt to estimate how many pages are in its collection, as far as I can see - they typically measure it by the cubic meter. The collection stretches back 800 years and requires about 5km (over 3 miles) of shelving to store it all.
2 - Preserving the original documents is the primary job here, and that job is not going away, ever. A digital copy is simply not a good enough replacement. Remember that to a historian, the physical properties of a document may hold more useful information than its written contents.
3 - Digitization is not a fire-and-forget process. To be done properly you must consider what format the documents will be stored in and at what level of resolution, what kind of media to store them on, how to index them in such a way that they're readily retrievable, and then you must continue to maintain that infrastructure, ensuring that the documents remain accessible. I see a lot of people suggesting the speaker doesn't understand technology. I cannot comment on her actual level of expertise, but if you think it's just a problem of finding the right kind of scanner, I suspect that your understanding's a hell of a lot shallower than hers.
Given all of the above, it simply makes more sense for them to use their limited budget to focus on what they've been doing successfully for over a century now. She doesn't mention this in the video, but the Archive does in fact have an ongoing digitization project as part of their document preservation program - but given budgetary constraints and the extreme care with which many of the documents must be handled, they must be selective about what makes the cut. Over the last year, five of the Archive's more significant collections were digitized and are in the process of being made available online. Again, it's difficult to estimate, but based on a look at their collection catalog, this is probably not even a full 1% of their inventory.
She is saying that it is a process that technically will never end because of amounts involved and all formats deteriorate.
Cripes?
Blahammad Ali its an exclamation. It is a real one too. If you found that weird, you need to expand your vocabulary.
Damn great comment
Also errors are being introduced at what rate may you ask?
33%
This lady doesn't realize she could be an ASMR phenomenon. She's also got the perfect voice for narration.
it’s on the unintentional ASMR channel 🤣
Bayonetta
Nice ASMR.
The keyword here is "everything". She talks a lot about the cost and time it would take to digitize these things, which wouldn't be a problem if there wasn't much to digitize, but there's a *huge* amount of documents. So many that it would be practically impossible to digitize all, or even most of them.
I dabbled in digitization with my university library for several months. I had no idea of how difficult the task of creating, storing, and managing a digital archive of the scale of a 100 year old library. I can't even imagine the task of digitization of the documents of a nation with 1000 years or more of documents.
Michael Johnpoll Aye, and this archive that this woman works for (that has over 50km of shelving) is just for one singular English county!
She can digitize my scroll anytime
The archive has a very limited budget so simply cannot afford to digitise everything. Some of the more fragile items have been digitised and are online. This helps with the prime objective of the archive which is to preserve the documents. The catalogue for this archive is also online & is very helpful when it comes to planning a visit.
IT technology changes so fast that digitising is not a panacea. Just look at photos. I have glass slides dating back from before WW1 that are still readable and ZIP discs dating back 15 years which are not.
Floppy discs are outdated tech my guy. Stuff on solid state drives will last a long time, plus, there's cloud storage. The issue with material items like this, is that they can be lost in wars/fires. SO much history has been lost to fires and stuff, and people realise this, which is why archives quite literally are being digitised... Just slowly.
I was relaxed until she said “size matters”😒😞😔
Unfortunately for some it's actually a universal truth of everything lol
It does matter
@@thatstupiddawg5989 no it doesn't
thank the good lord you exist. I agree whole heartedly with your views. case in point. I have all my baby scans on 3inch floppy discs, and now I have nothing to view them on. thank God I have the originals. I'm all for the Internet and all its info and use it most days but there is an awful lot to be said for the excitement of holding a historical book. the smell alone is wonderful. and then there's knowing that someone produced it by hand. what we're they thinking and feeling?
Why not both? When you digitise something, you don't have to get rid of the originals. But it would vastly improve the accessibility of the documents.
If they are all stored in an archive - who's gonna look at them? Should history be restricted to those, that have the time to go to archives? That seems pretty bad to me.
And concerning your floppy-discs with the baby photos: The reason you can't view them anymore is because you neither kept your floppy-drive, nor did you transfer the pictures to another medium. So that's not a valid excuse.
And nowadays transfering data to a different medium is even easier, than it was back then. You can have a high-resolution picture on your phone, TV and computer, that is far crisper, than a printed photo could ever be.
Lmao your baby scans...
"I forgot to update my data storage to more modern standards for years and years despite having all the time in the world to do so, technology is so unreliable!"
If they're on floppy you're better off just buying a scanner and just rescanning at a higher resolution. Or hell your phone's probably good enough for archiving honestly.
We have a bunch of 35mm scans my grandma took, I did an initial scan on this film scanner, popped out her old projection scanner and projected those and took higher quality scans on a blackout cloth and it's night and day.
If your going to do something, do it right.
Not backing them up on modern tech was the mistake here, _not_ having them on floppy discs. This comment is 7 years old, but even then, floppy discs were _very_ outdated.
Should have been backed up on an SSD drive, a micro SD, and a cloud.
It would be interesting to have more of these videos about the issues facing the Bedfordshire archives, and what’s involved in looking after 000s of artefacts of cultural heritage.
7 years ago I thought she was a fool now I completely agree with her
What was meant exactly at 2:08 with regards to copyright? Who might be a copyright owner when it comes to historical documents? I'm not disputing the claims, just looking for it to be clarified
One needs to only research the National Personnel Archives Fire to see the importance of some sort of back up, or the very least, proper planning. Many, many people's military service records were lost which caused numerous veterans to go without proper pension, compensation, or access to medical care.
gogglespisano24 if you sneezed in that archive half of those boxes would blow into dust. You don’t even need a fire
Valid points. That is why archivists are such dedicated people. I may add the following... just as in history "selective" recording of history is done, I pretty sure "selective" digitizing is also done. Imagine the history lost during WWII, or the history lost by invasions as happening right now or in Mongolia and China in the 50's and 60's.
On the other hand I do appreciate digital records I can access from across the world, as I cannot afford to visit these wonderful places.
There's a balance to be calculated for sure.
just thought of something, why don't all of the folks on here who are getting agitated by her not digitising, offer your services to do the work, for free. then you can climb down off your soap box and feel good about yourself.
doreen watson-read Because she's the archivist, not us.
Most Satisfied wow talk about completely oblivious to the challenges archivists face. Archives are chronically underfunded and yet are constantly expected to do more with less. People want to point fingers and make demands without even knowing how archives compete for grant funding and donations to fund digitization projects and the fact that digitized assets must be monitored far more closely than physical materials. It’s not just scanning! It’s the metadata upkeep, planning for obsolescence, migrating data and things like checksums
All I’m hearing are excuses
She is not a Luddite. She wants intelligent thought put into preservation.
I could happily listen to this lady speak on any subject, whether or not I know anything about the topic, or agree with the content... Your Service Manager simply has a wonderful voice.
Pause it at 0:10
Phaha thanks for that 😂
Size does matter
Pure ASMR. This is wonderful. This is bliss.
I suppose it would have been quite a long, labourious task to transcribe the entire Library of Alexandria or the House of Wisdom at Baghdad - but would anyone question the value of such an enormous task today, now that what they contained has been entirely destroyed?
An imperfect copy is better than nothing. An incomplete record is better than a perfect blank. I hope at least what is unique in the collection is being prioritized for digitization...?
They would likely not have finished making backups of everything in the Library of Alexandria before it was lost. Then there's the question of where to put it all (obviously off-site). It's an impossible task to ask of anyone.
A razed Bedford Archives will not be mourned in the future in the same way the Great Library of Alexandria is.
Keep in mind this argument was made in 2014. Technology and costs have changed.
The issue is the mediums we have aren't guaranteed for any sort of long term use. No one makes flash storage that is immune from breaking down. Unless it's a dedicated lto storage system, but tapes don't last forever. Blu rays would be my second rec but that's even worse since most people don't have one in their computer. Dvds are more common but like cd it's only a matter of time till people stop making them.
Maybe CDs won't ever die, which would be great but their too damn small.
This lady is a serious archivist...look at those biceps! You don't get biceps like those by digitising the heck out of everything in Bedfordshire.
My dad runs an archive company. He says if we digitize everything without paper backups we become exponentially more likely to eventually lose them. EMPs, general electromagnetic interference...
That's why you back them up in multiple places. Also, far more history has been lost to war and fires.
Whispers in the depths of the archives....
She gonna flip when there's a fire
Oliver tree fan hi
The fire will destroy servers and computers pretty much in the same way.
She probably started it. “If I won’t digitise it, no one will”
@@AnotherInternetBlipare you dumb? This isn’t 1993
Why has this been the only video since 2014? @Bedfordshire archives
One fire and it's all gone. Not digitizing everything puts the records at risk. You don't need to release them to the public, just keep them on hard drives or something. It's pretty easy to get Terabyte HDD. The SATA standard has been the standard for years and years, there will always be a way to use it
***** So would loosing all of them. I understand that it would take a lot of man hours to do it, but I think the preservation is worth it
Are you *possibly* suggesting that the hardware that would be used in this instance would be on the same level as an industrial scanner used, or even lent by a university which has an interest in preserving the stored material, would share ANY problems associated with conventional scanners?
There are machines which can copy the entire contents of commercial textbooks and convert them to PDF formats. You think these century-old papers on Jstor are just popped onto a consumer-grade Brother printer and scanned? No. Modern archiving technology is faaaar beyond that.
People fetishize digital as if it’s so secure. The cloud and digital are not intangibles floating in the air. It all is very much physical whether at a data center or on your drive. It’s also physically vulnerable and why like archives, data centers have crazy security. One fire and it was also all be gone. And it’s even more at risk of fire because the servers in data centers generate sooo much heat. A lot of data centers energy is spent on just cooling down servers.
@@minisnape u don’t understand. The data is stored in multiple places
As seen with the Louvre fire a year ago. This comment aged well
While i totally understand the fear of people losing interest in physical media, what you're archiving is just that, media. Media which one could decide whether or not to share because it's archived. The neat thing about digitization is that it's easier to keep track of. There are so many pieces of lost media found because of online archives. And because of online archives, millions of people can create their own personal archives. We become each others archives in a sense. A digital file is just as delicate as a physical piece no doubt, as an artist of both mediums i've lost plenty of my work. But I take solace in knowing that if I don't have it, someone else does, as opposed to a physical piece, which I can't reproduce and faces higher chance of deterioration.
Also format converters exist. Just because YOU don't have an operative machine to do so doesn't mean no one else does.
I'm glad this archive is totally protected against any disaster, man made or natural, but for every other archive out there, the cost and difficulty is an argument for more and better digitization rather than not bothering. We still have copies of some small portion of what was at the library of Alexandria. How much could be preserved if every great archive maintained a backup of every other archive, that can't be done on physical copies anymore so digital representations are the only choice. Sure, if ubiquitous nanotechnology is available we could make physical copies but unless that happens having a digital copy of the physical artifacts, and the ability to work from both is by far the safest option.
Let's just hope no EMP fries it all, eh?
Publishing also helps information survive, but that also costs money.
You have a very relaxing speech pattern. It would be wonderful if you made more videos of yourself talking about your job. Some topics could include the challenges you face, daily tasks, what qualifies as a piece of heritage worth archiving etc etc.. In any case, even if you don't, thank you for making this video.
Is it just me or does she make you feel as if your getting told of?
Like?
"size matters" my g
Without digital access, nobody will ever look at 99% of those documents ever again. The vast majority of the public will never visit an archive but everyone is on the internet. What's the point of historical documents if not to be studied and appreciated?
Long-term digital storage is definitely a field of study and is far from an unsolved problem. By not digitizing, you're putting every single one of those documents at risk.
Half of what i heard was complaining about how time consuming it would be. Keep in mind, tho, that a work she was complaining is something a non-digitally-skilled person could do. And also, the documents are going to stay there for (i quote) centuries. The archive's got time. It's not going anywhere. Better to begin to do the relatively cheap things, no?
A lot of the more important documents that people will want to see are often digitized, though. But it's insane to expect everything to be put up online with such limited funds available.
I understand her point of view. But the argument could be made in the reverse as well. You need people, money, space, time and equiment to maintain physical documents. And then there's the potential of those documents being destroyed forever. Digitizing is a monumental task, but well worth it. I'd rather have multiple ways and sources of viewing said document. Instead of one, which takes time, money, and people just to retrieve and view it. Can all of it be digitized? Of course not, but trying is better than letting it possibly be lost from history for good.
I guess the scale of large academic libraries and archives is too difficult to understand unless one has worked in one. You somehow aren’t getting the fulness of this, and that is exactly why this lady dreads the question.
We should dread this as well - Contemplate this as a counterexample - time and money here but also a lengthy (in some many cases infinite) interruption in research
th-cam.com/video/Ip6698z_QmY/w-d-xo.html
The Restoration of Books: Florence - 1968
BookbindersWorkshop
The original documents would still have to be looked after post-digitization. Maintaining the digital copies would just be added work. Certainly it is feasible for some documents, but not all.
I've heard the "but is now obsolete, so there's no point" argument so many times and it's nonsense. How about moving with the times? All my photographs are on multiple hard disks. When the time comes and hard disks are facing extinction, I'll transfer them to the new medium. That's the easy bit! The hard (laborious) bit was getting them into the digital domain to start with.
It's one thing juggling your hard disks now, but in terms of very long-term low-maintenance archival storage we don't have it available yet. Maybe one day, not yet.
She refers to digitized documents as "images" however with text recogniziton technology these images can be converted in to information which can be stored, manipulated and displayed very easily. Also, there's very inexpensive technology available to get the images required for tdoing this. It need not be a supremely quality image, but just enough for the recogniztion software to do its job. This would preserve the documents information for all time.
Simple! Problem solved, then. The experts are idiots.
This is my most pet of peeves-someone strolls in and solves all the problems in 10 seconds that the people trying to solve the problem for decades already have unable to. This thought process is why there is an orange president in the White House.
@@RichardHandal301 nope ur completely wrong. The experts are usually stuck in their ways- like you are. When someone with a better understanding comes along they refuse to give way. Sit down and shut up. The orange man was in the White House beside people wanted change
I work with data and computers and I can assure you that 9 years ago, I wasn't aware of cloud storage.. She blew my mind on that one.
You all heard her guys. "size DOES matter."
That's right, too loose is no use.
Why do I like unintentional asmr over actual professional asmr done by the experts like asmr darling?
Amy Furniss you consider those teenage girls using their looks for views as “experts”?? LMAO
Whispering annoys the sh*t out of me, personally, especially the fake way all the cute ASMR girls do it. Give me a boring talk or lecture any day.
While I can appreciate your points regarding digitization and it's myriad number of difficulties, I can't help but think about the demise of the famous Library of Alexandra. The one argument that trumps all the cost and tedious processing is retention and preservation of the information it's self. At least some drunk Roman couldn't come along, pass out, drop his torch and destroy it for all time. We'll never know what incredible literary treasures were lost in that tragedy.
By all means, please continue to save the physical originals, don't worry about making the digital version accessible, keep it on solid state drives in a lunar vault or something, just don't let catastrophe determine the fate of the information. We don't write things down because we like the way the storage medium looks, smells or feels after a hundred years. The thoughts, data, history is what matters, right?
ASMR before it was known
Please archivist lady, could you start reading audiobooks as a side job 😊. Also start an ASMR channel called *ASMR archivist* doing quiet tours on those basements with only you softly explaing stuff and reading some old nice documents.
Millions would enjoy.
Her last point.... is her entire point. If they digitize, then they may lose control of where the funding comes from and to whom the funding goes to. Sounds like there is an opportunity for a web business to make some money providing these documents in digital form. The entities who need to reference these documents will gladly pay a small fee for the ease of access that these dusty old state funded institutions are unwilling to provide.
Amazing asmr
Shame this would have been an amazing asmr channel. Leaves you wondering what ever happened to this lady and why did she stop?
Got a glimpse of the internet.....i don't know.
Look at the degenerates in the comments and wonder no longer.
She got digitized.
I don’t trust technology to be honest! If I’ve created an important document for my boss then I’ll always save it in multiple places as well as print it off, if the document has been wiped from my computer somehow then I’ll always have a hard printed copy as a last resort.
We're hoping. (Is it confidential and all over the place?)
This is why Archivists always fail Speed Dating
😆 Oh man. That is rich. Haha loved it!
Considering what took place on Altair IV she may want to reconsider cloud storage.
Jheeze I wish I’d never even asked in the first place!
You heard her fellas size matters
‘Size matters’
Instead of saving material for preservation? They want to horde everything with mold and risk the possibility of a fire? Wand scanners are a much better alternative than a fire
WinterXL Why did you copy and paste this in every bloody comment jesus chill out man
all i heard was pragmatic explanation of why actual digitizing efforts are limited in scope relative to available source material. not that no digitization should happen.
ditto . . .
A fire would destroy the digital backups too. And archivists take special care not to let documents go moldy, why would you even suggest they wouldn't?
It's B.C. 48. Two librarians overlook the smoldering ashes of the Library of Alexandria*
"Boy, I sure am glad we don't have any digital documentation for any of that junk."
"Heard that. WAY too expensive."
And where would they have kept the hard drives, flash drives, or servers for storing those backups? In the Library, I take it?
Oops, look at that, still burned with everything else.
Andrew Jenkins ever heard of the cloud
Digitise those of priority first. I hope you're not arguing that NOTHING should be digitised. Fire equals gone forever.
No. Its not arguing that nothing should be digitised, just that everything shouldn't be digitised because of... Well all of the reasons she listed in this video (I'm too lazy to type it all out).
Please make more videos like this
She looks like she’s turning into a book.
Hilarious
Ha
Lovely video
What is this lady's name?
Pamela Birch.
She's....attractive.
Bat Says Ha! I bet she’s a beast in the sack.
Sweet ASMR Heaven 🥰
At length 👀
I can totally understand not WANTING to digitize it all but it should be done. In an effort to preserve the unpreservable. Yes lets hope all of these fabulous documents don't eventually turn to dust. I get it. But for heaven sakes lets not throw the baby out with the bath water. If there is a means to have at least a passable "Representation" of the document. It should be done.
She is attractive somehow. Is it the accent perhaps?
Size matters.
Confirmed, size matters.
This didn't age well, because pretty much everything is being digitised bit by bit, and eventually, it will. Not everything, but it'll be a gradual process, seeing as new things are always being added.
Also, the help of AI will make the job much easier in time, most likely.
Sure, there's a lot of stuff to digitise, but even more has been lost to history in wars and fires, which makes it alll the more important to digitise.
Digitised information is practically immortalised as long as the infrastructure remains up and healthy, and even then, x amount of backups can be made.
Digitising things, is, I'd argue, more important than keeping all these bits of paper to begin with, because materials will always perish eventually.
Sure, something like a solar flare could render it all gone, along with most other info, but, something like that happening, even in the next multiple generations, is very unlikely.
Keeping the hard copies is still important, but, yeah, stuff like this is literally being digitised as we speak. This lady talks as if it's an impossible task, but it's not, it's just something that will be taking place for a long time.
The rate at which tech is growing is insane and costs are getting much cheaper due to it.
Can you make a whispering and inaudible? Like you
5km of boxes O.o
Great ASMR. Please make more videos like this one!
Sounds like she just crumpled the note up off screen in the beginning lol
CD-ROMs have a life expectancy of 100 to 200 years or more. Nothing will happen to those.
But who still stores data on them?
@@andrewjenkins9965 Movie and videogame publishers?
I've had them wear-out in a year of use.
Yeah cuz 100 years is such a super long time .
0.10 length
01.32 size matters
03.33 five inch floppies
Whats she hinting about?
What if there is a fire, an act of terrorism or a war, for example, and they are destroyed forever. It would be a prodigious loss to the world if these irreplaceable, historical records were to be lost forever. Also, there is the second law of thermodynamics, which invariably has inexorable, deleterious consequences on everything, known as entropy. I would at least consider some kind of back up. 😊😊
She didn’t say not to digitize anything, she’s explaining why one doesn’t and can’t practically digitize everything and keep only the digital copy. Watch the video again, and don’t conveniently ignore the troublesome portions next time.
Richard Handal she states the question she dreads the most is, "aren't you going to digitize it all? The answer is no." This is the negative response I commented on. She does implicitly state it is possible to digitize everything. However, she then laboriously explains due to costs, manpower and the multitudinous files that would need to be digitised, it would be impractical to do so. I just feel it would be more prudent, notwithstanding the cost, time and manpower, to perpetuate these important historical records. My best intentions are in my first comment and I have the highest respect for this lady. She obviously adores her work. 😊😊
Until majorities of elected officials consist of more librarians and archivists than lawyers, money for such conceptual niceties is not going to be allocated for them. People rather have healthcare, no potholes, and whiter teeth than court records preserved from 300 years ago. Meanwhile, unique recordings of indigenous tribes of Brazil went up in flames two days ago and are lost forever. This is the state of the world.
Richard Handal I agree. I look forward to a time when a balance has been achieved. Health care, dental care, world peace, homelessness and many more similarly important issues need to be of the highest priority. However, these documents are our history and history can be the greatest teacher. When we have the opportunity to study, and learn the ups and downs of history; we can be more perceptive of which paths to take and which ones to avoid.
World wars 1 and 2 to be avoided, but band aid, live aid etcetera are good paths to walk. If that history was some how lost, we might end up making similar mistakes. You seem like a sagacious person, so you understand. Most records are left for prosperity for our progeny, they are a guide, markers to avoid catastrophic mistakes made by their ancestors, us. With these records perpetual and prevalent humanity might just do fine. 😊😊
I used to work in curitorial at the Library of Congress, and I follow politics closely. Were I king, I’d appoint armies of people to train as preservationists. I don’t think my priorities are in sync with the zeitgeist.
"So size matters!" Fucking size queen
Please start an ASMR channel you'll make a bomb!
now ask her if she can sneak out high quality copies of raw studio footage and 71 edits of bbc programs
TL;DW: Nyquist ;)
I think this archivist is well fit 💋
🥰🥰🥰
First we used stone tablets, what happened to those? Then we used wax, what happened to that? Then we used papyrus, what happened to papyrus?
Technology in a few decades will make this viable, it will happen eventually, perhaps not in your lifetime
I think The Library of Congress strikes the right balance.
I watched this because I saw it was a asmr on a channel looked at the comments a bunch of ppl saying shit I don’t even understand
i mean you could just scan them but yano...save them to a cloud or something
dm me if u look like this
It’s all digital now btw lol
"A didital image produced online is often black and white and not very detailed. This allows it to load quickly."
What?.....
Maybe 20 years ago...
We have 4k monitors and Gigabit-internet now. Hell, even phones have HD-screens.
While it's true, that the original document can give you some information like texture and material - I doubt, that that information will be relevant most of the times. I take easy storage, easy reproduction and easy accessibility over that any time.
Just imagine if all the ancient libraries and archives had digitised their things. We would still have access to their wealth.
Also not everybody can just take a plane and fly all over the place just to visit an archive....
Your view seems to be very narrow minded and is actually hurting everything you're archiving. Because nobody will read it.
Storing digital documents isn’t easy… lady where do you think this you tube video is being stored . It is easy
The TMA vibes
I knew if I came to the comments there'd be at least one here 🤣
So don't ask her about digitization on a date. Got it.
so basically, it's too much effort. just saved you 7 minutes
This was filmed before LLMs were a thing. You could easily just have an AI transcribe it all nowadays.
Helllooooo asmr
Bruh i was the 666 like... Now thats epic
I agreed mostly, except for the part about making the digital assets "keep up" with technology. This is clearly an assertion from someone who isn't technology savvy. Binary is binary.
You still storing your wav files on your floppies then?
I want to use many thirsty adjectives for this but I can't. I wish youngsters aspired to speak in this very British way. American slang, spelling and grammar is taking over the vernacular.
Update: Ann the archivists job has been taken over by a droid. She is currently unemployed.
I like this channel but this video is just stupid. Digitizing may be a lot of work but it makes preserving the archives much easier. I feel like she doesn't understand how digital copies work.
And when the format you store the digitized copy on becomes outdated and unusable, then what?
You still need to maintain the original. I don't think you learned anything from this video.
Rubbish. Aside from the cost, which is understeandable, this woman is only complaining that it takes hours of her work.
Wow... Talk about being stuck in the past and refusing to acknowledge the benefits of modern archiving.
The whole "its very difficult and time consuming, so we're not gonna bother" - attitude is just pathetic. Slowing down progress won't stop progress, it'll just irritate the people actually needs access to the contents of the documents.
Images could easily be in colour, all information about the documents storage locations through time, author, material type, smell, dimensions.. Etc., could be added as meta data, and therefore become searchable. That means you could search for a document written on animal hide, stored at a specific location at a specific point in time. Then, within seconds, get a series of high resolution images of said documents, with all the meta data attached. Or how about this: search for a location only, then get all documents ever stored there. Add a dynamic timeline, and you can scroll through time to see what was stored when. The possibilities are endless.
You are only holding back progress momentarily, eventually it will all be digitised.
And when the format you store the digitized copy on becomes outdated and unusable, then what?
Devin Devon For the foreseeable future, the internet isn't going to become outdated and unusable.
The Bull Neither are words printed on paper, even in a power outage.
The Bull Btw, never save anything on a floppy disc.
The Bull You probably don't want to store your music collection on Winamp either.