AZebra Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I really phrased that improperly!
>
> I like seeing you share your photos to this site,
> and I would like to do the same with some of mine,
> before I someday die and whomever ends up dealing
> with my stuff throws them all out. Especially
> pictures that have railroaders in them, showing
> them doing their job, I would like to post in case
> any of their family and friends are out there; my
> grandfather was a locomotive engineer on a
> northeastern railroad, and every so often a
> picture surfaces in a book or on the web of him on
> the railroad, and it makes my day.
>
> My question to you was more about do you need to
> save to Flickr, Imgur, Photobucket or elsewhere
> then link to your photo, or can you save directly
> to AP?
>
> Since our paths have apparently crossed a couple
> of times on some of these trips (Nacozari, NN,
> others) I would certainly like to download a copy
> of some of your photos of those same trips if you
> are cool with it. But yes, please watermark them
> first, if it's not my picture, then I want to know
> who's it is and where it came from!

Without maintenance, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. How might we secure our data so that it survives for generations?

By Adrienne Bernhard @adrienneeve

Jul 19, 02023

“This challenge is not something that one organization is going to solve: it has to be a collective effort,” says Bailey. Federal agencies, public libraries, research institutions and private corporations, each with different budgets and mandates, must come together to address the issue of storage and associated concerns. And, as technology accelerates and emulation of older systems becomes more difficult, Digital Dark Age preppers may need to consider not just the survival of data, but the possibility that it may be misunderstood. Getting future readers to parse what we’ve preserved, and to make sense of that information, is an existential challenge without easy answers.

As Rosenzweig puts it: “Because digital data are in the simple lingua franca of bits, of ones and zeros, they can be embodied in magnetic impulses that require almost no physical space, be transmitted over long distances, and represent very different objects (for instance, words, pictures, or sounds as well as text).” Barring the invention of some extraordinary universal translation system, making sense of these binary codes without knowing how they were intended to be read is impossible. Also consider online disinformation, spread either by humans or artificial intelligence. Many digital archives already struggle to exclude or annotate content, not to mention living websites like Wikipedia, Twitter or Facebook, which must be continuously monitored for harmful or fraudulent content. “If you exclude fake news, does that mean you run the risk of a non-representative archive?” asks Bailey. “We are open to removal if there’s a reason, and we do it.”

Public and private organizations and policy-makers will need to decide what content should be restricted, embargoed, or scraped from the web entirely, and design robust digital repositories that can weather the ravages of time. People with limited resources must also be ensured the ability to preserve their data; long-term storage should be designed for equity as well as for sustainability. Finally, we must be judicious in what we store and preserve, creating a meaningful collection for future historians. Our future — and our past — depend on it

...even Altamont Press will meet the same fate as the late West Coast Rail Forums some day.

You can give https://www.imagevenue.com/ a try to post images to Altamont Press.