Historic Hood River
VHS Memories
Notes
Morganne has suggested this stack of recently acquired VHS videotapes for today’s post. There was a day when this was how you learned new moves or watched people doing moves you would never do. Now you can watch “Screaming Waters” on Youtube. Viewers of this site who don’t have any interest in the history of windsurfing may still enjoy it, as it does a good job of interspersing wonderful historic footage of the Columbia River Highway from the 1931 film “Singing Waters” between clips of retro windsurfing action– all to the surf-rock stylings of local band the Ultronz.
You can also watch a clip from “Hard Winds a Blowin'”. I’ll spare you a link to the dozens of instructional videos available online.
This is a good lead-in to a museum collection management discussion. We have all sorts of media in our collection: everything from wax cylinder records to wire recording to magnetic tape. We have fully digital images/ audio/ video. Each brings its own special problem. I’ve fixed up our Edison players so we can enjoy the wax cylinders for many years, but magnetic tape decays much faster and a VHS player is a much more complicated mechanism. VHS tapes need to be transferred to a digital form if we want to preserve them, while a wax cylinder still has some life to it. Of course digital file formats change all the time. Many older audio and video formats are already defunct. Have you tried to read a Kodak Photo CD lately? Or a 5 1/4″ floppy disk?
Our large and growing digital image archive (>20,000 images now) is stored in a format used by the Library of Congress, so hopefully the format will be supported for a long time. You can read the Library of Congress’ thoughts on file formats here. Our files have multiple offsite backups, and I hope to boost our redundancy with cloud storage soon.
The long term viability of a collection like ours requires constant migration of files from one storage medium to another as technology advances. I’ve already had to move our full catalog from one set of hard drives to a newer newer one. You may recall we recently moved this entire website to a different platform to preserve these posts and all your comments for a while longer.
But the question digital archivists have to ask is “How will people access our digital images or the contents of this site ten years or one hundred years from now?” We don’t have a complete answer, but it depends upon robust institutions capable of migrating media and the data they contain onto ever advancing media and formats– institutions which live beyond individuals.
Tags: Morganne's Mondays, sports, VCR, VHS tapes, video, videotapes, windsurfing
Dale Nicol
I think these are some of the videos I brought in about 3-4 months ago…..maybe 6-8 videos.
They were given to me by Suzy Kahorsky (sp) about 20 years ago when she was moving. We were neighbors at the time. Both of us belonged to CGWA and she wanted the videos to remain and help others learn some of the educational windsurfing techniques. When we decided to move recently, I thought the History Museum was the best place to leave the videos.
Arlen L sheldrake
Thank you Arthur for an excellent description of one of the problems facing all museum collections. One of the solutions for some PNW rail history organizations is to form and support group efforts like the Pacific Northwest Rail Archives in Burien, WA.