Wessex grasp the nettle of non-Digital Photographic sustainability

[Marc Berger]

I agree Sith but digital does not need these curators any more. Dump your film on them and wave goodbye. The Wessex draft policy says

While the archival stability of digital imaging has not yet been proven to the same degree as film, there is now considered to be no advantage of analogue over digital imaging as an archival format. Any archive requires appropriate management to ensure its survival, and with digital information there is no reason why it cannot be preserved indefinitely. Digital imaging in fact provides a number of benefits, such as multiple backups, ease of access and considerable space savings.

I don't know how Wessex work out the no advantage of analogue over digital but the archival quality of digital is in the so called backup or copy. The museum curation of an original film/picture eventually as the film degraded probably relied on making a copy and then treating that as an original and protecting it from the next nuclear war. I don't see anybody doing that anymore. Its just unreasonably expensive. With digital we can make hundreds a copies at the outset and daily for evermore and expect that a copy will survive the next catastrophe in some corner of the internet. In the Wessex model it mentions ads as the archive for digital images

With the above in mind, WA policy will be to rely on digital imaging to provide the sole photographic archive for any Terrestrial Fieldwork or Built Heritage project in England and Wales. This policy is in line with standards produced by English Heritage, the Institute for Archaeologists, the Archaeological Archives Forum and the London Archaeological Archive Research Centre. Images will be captured in a RAW format using cameras with manual controls and sensors of at least 10 megapixels. Images will then be converted to uncompressed baseline v.6 TIFF for archiving. All images will have accompanying metadata specifying; photo ID, capture device, converting software, colour space, bit depth, resolution, date of capture, photographer, caption, and any alterations made to the image. As part of this policy, provision will be made for the long term archiving of digital images with the Archaeological Data Service.

but digital data has to be archived in as many internet places as possible and interestingly the diggers identity is part of the authenticity. Diggers probably couldn't do better than to use their phones to load their photos directly to face book.

It would be nice if somebody from Wessex could confirm that they defiantly don't use analogue anymore.