Circle 42 on the Reader Service Card

[Blue Mountain]

Today I received a Truth and Reconciliation Keepsake (essentially a coin with no face value) that I ordered from the Royal Canadian Mint. It's to commemorate and remember the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada that documented the history and lasting impacts of 150 years of native residential schools, and abuse students suffered there (including at least 3,200 deaths, mostly from disease.)

The coin arrived packaged in an 11¾"×5⅜" cardboard bi-fold. Written in English and French, it covers the points mentioned above along with the following text:

The beautiful and richly symbolic imagery, reflective of First Nations, Inuit. and Métis teaching and traditional art forms, demonstrates that these cultures remain vibrant in spite of the harms inflicted by the residential school era.
...
For a complete description of the design, please visit mint.ca/TR

(Note, while the text of the above link is accurate, I set it up with the wrong URL to make a point.)

This seems to be very short sighted. It reminds me of:

• For more information, send a clay table written in cuneiform to the High Priest in Akkad
• Send a telegram to the Minister of Indian Affairs, Ottawa
• Circle 42 on the Reader Service Card
• Use our fax back service at 1-800-555-0122

With care, the packaging will keep for over a century and the keepsake itself for considerably longer. Will the "TR" page still exist even a decade from now? Will mint.ca still exist in 2123? Or even what we think of as the World Wide Web?

Information on the web is terribly ephemeral (see link rot, and I do appreciate the irony of linking to a web site to buttress my claims of web sites being ephemeral!) Compare that with the Domesday book compiled in 1086, still readable today, provided, of course, one can read Latin. The Behistun inscription is over 2500 years old and is still available, primarily because it was chiseled into a rock face. Papyrus documents have been found that date back 4,000 years.

Full information on the keepsake’s description should have been included with the cardboard packaging, to ensure it would be available to a collector or museum a century or two from now.

 

[Trebuchet]

42 is, of course, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
And for the curious, here's an actual link I looked up.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Today I received a Truth and Reconciliation Keepsake (essentially a coin with no face value) that I ordered from the Royal Canadian Mint. It's to commemorate and remember the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada that documented the history and lasting impacts of 150 years of native residential schools, and abuse students suffered there (including at least 3,200 deaths, mostly from disease.)

The coin arrived packaged in an 11¾"×5⅜" cardboard bi-fold. Written in English and French, it covers the points mentioned above along with the following text:


(Note, while the text of the above link is accurate, I set it up with the wrong URL to make a point.)

This seems to be very short sighted. It reminds me of:

• For more information, send a clay table written in cuneiform to the High Priest in Akkad
• Send a telegram to the Minister of Indian Affairs, Ottawa
• Circle 42 on the Reader Service Card
• Use our fax back service at 1-800-555-0122

With care, the packaging will keep for over a century and the keepsake itself for considerably longer. Will the "TR" page still exist even a decade from now? Will mint.ca still exist in 2123? Or even what we think of as the World Wide Web?

Information on the web is terribly ephemeral (see link rot, and I do appreciate the irony of linking to a web site to buttress my claims of web sites being ephemeral!) Compare that with the Domesday book compiled in 1086, still readable today, provided, of course, one can read Latin. The Behistun inscription is over 2500 years old and is still available, primarily because it was chiseled into a rock face. Papyrus documents have been found that date back 4,000 years.

Full information on the keepsake’s description should have been included with the cardboard packaging, to ensure it would be available to a collector or museum a century or two from now.

I know and understand exactly what you are saying and get your point. But not everyone cares about "a complete description of the design" and the admittedly minor cost of printing it for everyone adds to my tax burden. If you are truly concerned, print out the web page and save it with the medallion. I'll not delve into issues of the permanency of printer paper or ink.

 

[theprestige]

Or the permanency of cardboard sheets. But have you been to the website? The complete description is pretty basic. I can't imagine it costing enough in extra printing costs to make a real difference to taxpayers.

Also, aren't the costs of these kinds of commemorative coins typically borne by the purchaser? Is the Canadian government actually subsidizing these offerings from the mint? That would probably be a much greater concern.

Personally, if I'm buying one of these, I'd expect it to come with a complete guide. Even if that means I have to pay an extra 0.001 maple leafs or whatever currency the use in America's hat, for all the oceans of ink that would require.

 

[Blue Mountain]

I know and understand exactly what you are saying and get your point. But not everyone cares about "a complete description of the design" and the admittedly minor cost of printing it for everyone adds to my tax burden.

There's no tax burden here. The mint made a 79 million dollar profit in 2021, which went back into general government revenue.

If you are truly concerned, print out the web page and save it with the medallion. I'll not delve into issues of the permanency of printer paper or ink.

Unfortunately, the web site is one of these cute "Web 2.0" things that looks great on screen but doesn't translate well to paper. Especially the information I'm interested in—it's in a slider! Firefox and Chromium will print the first image of the slider but not the other three. It's akin to suggesting one "print out" a 30 second TV spot.

 

[novaphile]

I like that you mentioned baked clay cuniform tablets.

They're around 5,000 years old and still quite readable today.

Most written things we're producing today won't even last 100 years.

I've had books whose pages decayed into dust because of the acid in the paper manufacturing process.
Those books were from the 1950's.

Imagine my joy when I pulled out an envelope with a laser-printed letter, and found that all the letters had peeled off the page. (The individual letters were perfect little pieces of plastic, just not stuck on the page anymore) I have no idea what caused that to happen.

Each time we move to a new storage medium, there is a huge effort required to convert old data to the new medium. (And very often it is not done).

Makes you wonder if we should go back to recording things on clay and leaving it out in the sun doesn't it?

 

[rjh01]

I like that you mentioned baked clay cuniform tablets.

They're around 5,000 years old and still quite readable today.

Most written things we're producing today won't even last 100 years.

I've had books whose pages decayed into dust because of the acid in the paper manufacturing process.
Those books were from the 1950's.

Imagine my joy when I pulled out an envelope with a laser-printed letter, and found that all the letters had peeled off the page. (The individual letters were perfect little pieces of plastic, just not stuck on the page anymore) I have no idea what caused that to happen.

Each time we move to a new storage medium, there is a huge effort required to convert old data to the new medium. (And very often it is not done).

Makes you wonder if we should go back to recording things on clay and leaving it out in the sun doesn't it?

It is what pdf was designed to do. The software is included in the document. Only trouble is that you need somehow to store it. DVDs may last forever, but not the technology needed to read them. In a few years' time, they will have the same status as floppy discs. External hard drives may not work after a few years and USBs may change to USBC soon.

About the only good technology that should last a long time is microfiche.

 

[Blue Mountain]

It is what pdf was designed to do. The software is included in the document..

No, the software required to read the document is not included in the document. Given the different computer architectures out there (Intel, PowerPC, ARM, IBM z) it would be impossible to include a binary or even a JavaScript executable. What can be embedded are the fonts needed to render the document. But to view it, you need an external program such as Adobe Reader, Sumatra PDF, pdftotext, etc.

Only trouble is that you need somehow to store it. DVDs may last forever, but not the technology needed to read them. In a few years' time, they will have the same status as floppy discs. External hard drives may not work after a few years and USBs may change to USBC soon.

Very true. Format churn is the bane of the computer archivist's existence. Every decade or so you have to port all your data from one storage medium to another before the technology required to read the old media becomes obsolete. And every time there's a lot more data to port.

About the only good technology that should last a long time is microfiche.

I wonder how long the plastic substrate in the microfiche will be viable before it, too, starts to crumble when being handled?

Wikipedia says about 500 years:

It is a relatively stable archival form when properly processed and stored. Preservation standard microfilms use the silver halide process, creating silver images in hard gelatin emulsion on a polyester base. With appropriate, difficult to maintain, storage conditions, this film has a life expectancy of ~500 years. However, when temperature and humidity levels are greater than required a number of things often happen. Fungus can eat the gelatin used to bind the silver halide. The acetate base of the film degrades also known as Vinegar Syndrome. Redox is the oxidation of the surface of the film and is often found in higher humidity areas. Regardless of temperature, blemishes (REDOX) appear on film and are caused by oxidation of materials stored with or near film. Diazo-based systems with lower archival lives (<20 years) which have polyester or epoxy surfaces are commonly used as a means to duplicate and distribute film to a broader number of users. Diazo is not used as a film master but as a duplicate of a silver based image.

 

[novaphile]

It is what pdf was designed to do. The software is included in the document. Only trouble is that you need somehow to store it. DVDs may last forever, but not the technology needed to read them. In a few years' time, they will have the same status as floppy discs. External hard drives may not work after a few years and USBs may change to USBC soon.

About the only good technology that should last a long time is microfiche.

Glass microfiche maybe.

I often had to consult microfiche archives in the past, and the plastic ones decompose very quickly.

Would often find whole blocks (i.e. a period of time) that had depolymerised and become a sticky unusable mess.

 

[novaphile]

No, the software required to read the document is not included in the document. Given the different computer architectures out there (Intel, PowerPC, ARM, IBM z) it would be impossible to include a binary or even a JavaScript executable. What can be embedded are the fonts needed to render the document. But to view it, you need an external program such as Adobe Reader, Sumatra PDF, pdftotext, etc.


Very true. Format churn is the bane of the computer archivist's existence. Every decade or so you have to port all your data from one storage medium to another before the technology required to read the old media becomes obsolete. And every time there's a lot more data to port.


I wonder how long the plastic substrate in the microfiche will be viable before it, too, starts to crumble when being handled?

Wikipedia says about 500 years:

Note that the article refers to 'preservation standard' microfiche.

I'm guessing that is not what I've used in the past.

Note that DVDs may last a long time, but I've never seen an archival standard DVD, which is a platinum substrate contained inside a glass disc. (IIRC)

 

[rjh01]

I asked chatGPT about long-term storage of text. Its reply was

A good technology to store text long-term would be:

Optical media (CDs, DVDs)
Archival grade hard drives
Cloud storage with backup and versioning
Microfilm or microfiche
Magnetic tape data storage.

I guess it is not thinking of anything more than a few decades. If it is required for 1,000s of years, as mentioned above, only text on stone has been proven to work. Then languages have been lost to time.

One classic problem of this nature is that we bury radioactive substances that will remain radioactive for 1000s of years. How do we put up a warning that this area is not to be dug up in a way that will be understood in the future?

 

[theprestige]

It's not thinking of anything. It's regurgitating a mishmash of actual human thought that somehow made it into its corpus and got pureed by the blender of its algorithms.

This impulse to defer human cognition to half-baked "AI" is more dangerous to the survival of the species than nuclear weapons.

Don't debase yourself by referring to a chatbot. You're a human talking to other humans. Give us the respect we deserve. Leave the droids at the door.

 

[CORed]

I like that you mentioned baked clay cuniform tablets.

They're around 5,000 years old and still quite readable today.

Most written things we're producing today won't even last 100 years.

I've had books whose pages decayed into dust because of the acid in the paper manufacturing process.
Those books were from the 1950's.

Imagine my joy when I pulled out an envelope with a laser-printed letter, and found that all the letters had peeled off the page. (The individual letters were perfect little pieces of plastic, just not stuck on the page anymore) I have no idea what caused that to happen.

Each time we move to a new storage medium, there is a huge effort required to convert old data to the new medium. (And very often it is not done).

Makes you wonder if we should go back to recording things on clay and leaving it out in the sun doesn't it?

I've never encountered the phenomenon with the letters peeling off a laser printed pages. A wild guess would be that the paper had some sort of coating that the toner used in the printer wouldn't adhere to.

 

[CORed]

I like that you mentioned baked clay cuniform tablets.

They're around 5,000 years old and still quite readable today.

Most written things we're producing today won't even last 100 years.

I've had books whose pages decayed into dust because of the acid in the paper manufacturing process.
Those books were from the 1950's.

Imagine my joy when I pulled out an envelope with a laser-printed letter, and found that all the letters had peeled off the page. (The individual letters were perfect little pieces of plastic, just not stuck on the page anymore) I have no idea what caused that to happen.

Each time we move to a new storage medium, there is a huge effort required to convert old data to the new medium. (And very often it is not done).

Makes you wonder if we should go back to recording things on clay and leaving it out in the sun doesn't it?

I've never encountered the phenomenon with the letters peeling off a laser printed page. A wild guess would be that the paper had some sort of coating that the toner used in the printer wouldn't adhere to.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

I've never encountered the phenomenon with the letters peeling off a laser printed page. A wild guess would be that the paper had some sort of coating that the toner used in the printer wouldn't adhere to.

I have actually seen it happen in the early days of IBM's mainframe high-speed laser printers. Lots of "dust" and blank pages.

Laser printers use microscopic ink particles in a powdered form known as toner. Once heated by the fuser unit, the toner melts allowing it to be fused to the paper fibres under pressure.

If the fuser unit is not adjusted correctly (heat-wise or pressure-wise) , the ink does not bond and comes off at some point

 

[novaphile]

I've never encountered the phenomenon with the letters peeling off a laser printed page. A wild guess would be that the paper had some sort of coating that the toner used in the printer wouldn't adhere to.

I think it was something to do with the paper itself (or the paper glue) decomposing.

Under a microscope, I could see that the letters were covered with very short paper fibres on the back.

It could also be that the fuser was running at a temperature that was too low, meaning that the melted plastic wasn't penetrating deep enough into the paper.

I'm sorry that I didn't keep the result, having a tablet bottle filled with fallen off letters could be a bit amusing I suppose.

Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be a common problem.

 

[Darat]

I've never encountered the phenomenon with the letters peeling off a laser printed pages. A wild guess would be that the paper had some sort of coating that the toner used in the printer wouldn't adhere to.

Apparently, that is a common problem caused by using a heavier paper - who says you never learn anything here?

On a similar note - my last electric typewriter used a "plastic" type ribbon - you could read direct from the ribbon what you had typed as the character was stamped out of the ribbon. I know that can peel off; in fact it was one way to correct yourself - used your nail to scrape off the plastic letters and then overtyped.

 

[catsmate]

Apparently, that is a common problem caused by using a heavier paper - who says you never learn anything here?

On a similar note - my last electric typewriter used a "plastic" type ribbon - you could read direct from the ribbon what you had typed as the character was stamped out of the ribbon. I know that can peel off; in fact it was one way to correct yourself - used your nail to scrape off the plastic letters and then overtyped.

Daisywheel?

 

[Darat]

I do wonder what the future historians will think of our age when most communication is so ephemeral? Will it become a blackhole for them?

There are digital archives of course but will the Wayback machine still be there in a 100 years time? 200 years? I know I'm pretty unusual in having most of my emails saved from when I started an email address, but all my early Compuserve stuff has disappeared forever, probably the same for my AOL stuff and when I die it will evaporate away (never mind about needing passwords to access) yet I still have letters my grandfather wrote and received from the 1920s, a hundred years ago that I can read today - a tad faded but still perfectly legible. I doubt anyone will a hundred years from now read be able to read anything I've posted or emailed. (Not that anyone would want to - it's all very mundane apart from the incident with the Duke, the Lady and the Prime Minister at that country house get-together.)

 

[Darat]

Daisywheel?

I can't quite recall, would have thought it was, I do know it was a Brother machine and was lightish grey!