For the last couple of months I’ve focused on looking through thousands of negatives and photos for The Register’s upcoming “Chronicles of Allen County, 1946-2000.”
It’s not as bad as it may sound to some, and, in fact, I’ve enjoyed placing photos with events that occur in the book.
I began with boxes of 4 x 5-inch negatives that the large format cameras of the 1930s through 1950s used. The images are crispy clear in detail and with today’s scanners come through much better than when printed in the newspapers of their day. In the 1960s we switched to using medium-format cameras such as the Hasselblad that used 2.25 x 2.25-inch negatives. A decade later we were into single-lens reflex cameras that used 35-millimeter film and measured 1 x 1.5-inches. And today, of course, digital photography has replaced film entirely.
In doing this project I have come to appreciate the durability of film. The negatives from 65 years ago are as good as the day they were processed and have an indeterminable lifespan as long as they are kept safe.
The preservation of digital photography, however, is not necessarily as secure.
You can inscribe something on a computer, but you can’t put it up on a shelf and expect to pick it out at random at 50, let alone 100 years from now and be able to read it. Computers of tomorrow will be very different, guaranteed. Experts recommend saving several copies of everything in as many formats as possible.
ACCORDING to a recent PBS Newshour program, the average lifespan of a web page is 92 days. Think about how often you have searched a subject and a supposed link dead-ends. When put up on the web, information, including photos, can be altered in any number of ways and deleted for all kinds of reasons.
That’s one reason newspapers have a beef with governmental bodies that refer citizens to their websites to retrieve the complete information contained in public notices.
The newspaper now receives a truncated version to publish. Sometimes the full version is indeed on the official website, sometimes not, and, to make matters worse, comes with an expiration date. You also have no way of knowing if that information has been altered in some sense from its original version.
Once something is in print, it becomes a permanent record.
Another example the Newshour used illustrating the frailty of the Internet was the downing of a civilian airplane in 2014 by Russian-backed rebels. The rebels bragged on their website they had downed an enemy plane in Ukraine and posted pictures of the burning fuselage. When it was discovered it was a commercial airline and that 283 civilians had perished in the incident, they quickly scrubbed all evidence of the posting.
The only way the incident was recorded was by a professional service that “crawls” the World Wide Web and captures such postings, much to the Russians’ chagrin.
As we’ve seen from all the fake news generated by the recent election, the Internet is very, very malleable.
