by
Peter Farquhar
© Tombo Media, San Francisco,
1996
BACKGROUND, REQUIREMENTS & ASSUMPTIONS
When I began the process of collecting, organizing, digitizing, and editing the various types of materials that make up this family history, I made a list of all the requirements that this project should meet in order to be of practical use to oral historians, professional family historians, scholars and researchers of all interests, and, perhaps most importantly, to the large number of concerned family members who are custodians of their family's historical materials and are wondering what they are ever going to do with all those papers, letters, documents, clippings, postcards, birth announcements, photographs, genealogical charts, locks of hair, menus, tapes, transcripts, and home movies.
Although it is probably impossible at present to preserve in digital form all of a person's or family's historical materials due to technical, economic, and time limitations, this CD illustrates that a considerable selection of that historical record can be collected and "archived" on one small digital disk. But why do it? The answer is simple: a) reproducing digital data is inexpensive; b) digital data does not degrade with time nor with repeated reproduction; c) it packs an enormous amount of different kinds of information into a very small disk; and, d) digital data is rapidly searchable. What, then, are the basic requirements to do all this?
REQUIREMENTS
The technology used should be commercially available; in other words, "off the shelf" hardware and software.
The technology should be economically feasible; the cost of setup and operation should be within the budget constraints of a small academic department, home or professional office.
Anyone with good computer skills, or is willing to put in the effort to learn, should be able to produce an oral history or family history on CD. Professional level skills and computer programming should not be required.
The following media must be accommodated: Text in a wide variety of formats; text with graphics; a broad range of graphic types; good quality audio; and some minimal video.
The CD should be cross platform (Mac, Windows, & UNIX), as should be most of the file formats.
Standard formats should be used, considering ease of use, cross platform compatibility, quality of data storage, and longevity.
The need to license proprietary software must be avoided.
The CD must be useful, serve real needs, solve real problems, and be relatively easy to use.
The data should be searchable, both quickly and meaningfully.
If possible, files and data within files should be able to be linked.
The MBF Family History CD meets these requirements. However, I add these caveats and assumptions:
ASSUMPTIONS
Change is rapid in the world of computers, and even though CDs are being guaranteed for a shelf life of a hundred years or more, eventually (10 50 years ?) the data will have to be transferred to new media and be translated into new formats. By using the recommended formats and procedures on the pages that follow, keeping different kinds of data in separate standardized formats, the future transfer to new higher capacity and more rapidly accessed media and/or the translation of files to better and more current formats should pose few problems.
Most of the time and effort in creating a permanent digital record is in the initial design and digitization process. Once data is in digital form it can be moved around and manipulated rapidly, accurately, and very cheaply.
Memory storage, speed of processing, and capability increase; the costs decrease.
As storage, speed, and capability increase, so too will complexity and the learning curve.
It will always take at least twice as long as you plan, even if you factor in taking twice as long; and it will usually cost more.
The most difficult problem with graphics isn't getting Photoshop to do something you've never tried before (you can always read the manual), it's deciding how much image quality to give up for smaller file size.