SC - Re: the future of our digital cookbooks (was: re: sca-cooks V1 #1492)

[Thomas Gloning]

Valoise wrote:
>>>
(...) while I'm definitely convinced that digitizing texts can be an
excellent way to increase access, be prepared to think in the long term.
I'm sure that they addressed this in the conference, but planning for
these kinds of projects has to include the funds to migrate images and
text from time to time as software and hardware moves on to new
technology. -- Archivists like to think in terms of keeping things
available for decades or centuries. In the world of information
technology something five years old is ancient and outmoded. I don't
mean to imply that digitizing historical resources isn't a good thing to
do, but never plan on transcribing or scanning something once and being
done with it.
<<<<

The best thing we can do _now_ with our transcriptions is to keep them
in a format that is close to SGML, the STANDARD GENERAL MARKUP LANGUAGE
and its offsprings like XML, HTML or the proposals of the Text Encoding
Initiative.

In addition, there are institutions like the famous Oxford Text Archive
(http://ota.ahds.ac.uk) that store Texts and "save" them for the future.
They _know_ how to do that. Anybody owning a reliable transcription of
an old cookbook should give a copy of the text and the relevant metadata
to the Oxford Text Archive (info at ota.ahds.ac.uk). They will take care
that your electronic text will be usable in 50 years. I might not be
with you in 2050, unless I get 90, but I hope my/our e-texts will.

Cheers,
Thomas

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