adj.(of records, archives, media, projects, activities, responsibilities, etc.) involving or making use of computer devices, data, or mediaTaubes 1958, 154A completely new system developed by Eastman Kodak, called Kodak Minicard, combines the high reproductivity of punchcard systems with the high information content of microfilm applications. The Minicard is a piece of photographic film 16 x 32 mm. Near one end of the Minicard is a slot that permits the card to be handled by means of a metal stick. The Minicard carries digital information in the form of clear or opaque dots, and in addition it may carry images of documents. The readable area of the Minicard can be used for code or images in any desired proportion. A single Minicard may have up to 12 image areas. Each image area may carry the image of a legal-size page, 8½ x 14 inches.Nugent 1983, 467I find the report to have one serious flaw: the lack of recognition of the archival merits of high-density digital storage media. Traditionally, with microfilm copies, the archivist has had to focus on the life expectancy of the medium, since, once deterioration has set in, it is irreversible and any subsequent copy generation will be worse than the previous one. This is not true of digital media.Bui 1984, 420A commercially sold movie videodisk has about thirty minutes of playing time to a side, and the disc itself has a capacity of up to 54,000 frames or tracks to a side. As in the film original, each of the disk’s frames is capable of holding a discrete and reproducible image in the form of codes, in either digital (binary) or analog form. Upon replay these codes are converted to either pictorial or textual images. It is the idea of the 108,000-image capacity per disk, if both sides are recorded in analog signals, that makes the potential of videodisk so attractive. (Digital coding allows for 40,000 tracks per side.)US CGO 1990, 12At the most basic level, electronic records consist of bits (binary digits) and bytes (a set of eight binary digits) that represent all data as some combination of ones and zeros. The bits and bytes are the lingua franca of the digital computer.NARA 1991, 14A critical concern in using optical disk media for archival storage is that of ensuring future retrievability. Unlike paper and microfilm, digital images stored on optical disks are not human-readable. Complex computer systems are required to read an optical disk and interpret the binary ones and zeros of a digital image and then display the image in a way intelligible to a human. This machine dependence introduces the factor of technology obsolescence, as in any computer-based system. Use of optical disks in archives storage will require the capability over time to transfer digital images from one system to another.Mitchell 1996, 200The increased digital nature of architectural records, many of which are viewed as disposable by their creators, raises questions for archivists about the records' intellectual and artifactual values.Rothenberg 1999, 3My focus is on digital documents, by which I mean informational artifacts, some or all aspects of whose intended behavior or use rely on their being encoded in digital form. The term “digital” in this context denotes any means of representing sequences of discrete symbolic values—each value having two or more unambiguously distinguishable states—so that they can, at least in principle, be accessed, manipulated, copied, stored, and transmitted entirely by mechanical means, with high reliability.Lynch 2000, 32In the digital environment, as Larry Lessig (1999) has recently emphasized, computer code is operationalizing and codifying ideas and principles that, historically, have been fuzzy or subjective, or that have been based on situational legal or social constructs.Hensen 2002, 169Cat is a 2000 graduate of Duke from Florence, South Carolina, and has worked with us in various capacities since her sophomore year, doing such tasks as basic processing, digital scanning, database entry, and copyright clearance for our Ad-Access digital project and for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Advertising.Boyer, Cheetham, and Johnson 2011, 653In 2005, the Department of Records launched its solution—PhillyHistory.org, a Web-based digital asset management system developed by a software consultant that brings Philadelphia’s historic images out of the archived file boxes and into the digital world.Craft, Gwynn, and Smith 2016, 188Digital surrogates can allow users to interact with the materials without causing further physical damage, alleviating some preservation concerns.
