On Sun, Jul 21, 2024 at 11:44:26AM -0400, Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic wrote:

There are a lot of candidates for such a project but you need to be more specific - where are you located, how much and why kind of media, deadline, is this a pro bono or commercial (paid) service?

You (and Dave, also in the thread) ask good questions/make good points. The problem is that I don't know yet what I'm getting into, how much I'll have to deal with, what portions of it'll be worth the time/effort/expense, etc. I do know that I'm going to be dealing with floppies, CDs, DVDs, ZIP disks, as well as with VHS, Beta, and other videotapes, some of which have been baked/frozen/moved/stored poorly. So I expect to encounter unreadable media with known/unknown content and/or readable media with content in obscure/obsolete formats and/or partially readable media with degraded content. I want to be judicious about asking for help, but I don't have a feel for what "judicious" looks like yet -- which is why I'm trying to put together a small group that I can annoy instead of annoying everyone. ;) (But I do understand that there's a point at which asking-for-help crosses over into really-should-be-paying-for-help, because it can turn into a huge time sink.) There's not really a budget for this, which is one reason why a substantial chunk of my life is now spent writing grant applications -- so that we [1] can have a budget. But there's a chicken-and-egg problem: I can't write "give us money just in case we hit this problem" because that won't fly (I know: I tried) (repeatedly); I need to wait until we bump into it and then explain why it's important that we solve it, e.g., "these documents have significance to X" or "this is the only surviving video of Y" or whatever. Meanwhile, I'm doing a lot of reading and trying to get myself up to a baseline level of knowledge in this area -- so that, hopefully, when I ask questions they're more well-informed questions. If there are any books/guides/web sites/etc. that I should have in front of my eyeballs, I'd be happy to hear about them. ---rsk [1] "we" == World River Center, a 501(c)3 and parent organization of the International Whitewater Hall of Fame. We're building an online, free, searchable archive of born-digital and digitized objects because most of the history of paddlesports is sitting in boxes in closets around the world...and it's being lost. We're trying to acquire it and save it from oblivion.