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Hi all, I have been doing some research lately on dedigitizing in a significant way. For longevity and posterity but this is not as simple. What medium should be used? and so much of our lives are now digital what are we to do with the digital life?
The problem I have short term is specifically creating a book of family history to pass on and have them add to it later on. I can create this on a computer but this medium is not safe for longevity. I thought maybe I can create a manuscript where I can add pages as we go on as well as make archival digital copies of important information and other files that I want to keep around but these need infrastructure like computers, electricity and compatibility with the current digital medium. Digital copies of books are one thing that I know may be frowned upon but if you confirm their authenticity yourself and keep a digital copy on a disk that cannot be altered for example creating your own digital library for yourself, this archive would become more manageable I would think and a great benefit for later generations who are more than likely to interact with them digitally.
So in my research, here are the mediums I found and I hope it can be useful to the Gizars.
Printing is essential as it is easy to produce, formatted and reproducible. The media I have chosen is the following:
-GNatural 85gsm 75% Cotton 25% linen inkjet paper
I chose this paper because it is, in my opinion the highest archival quality available for inkjet printing at a reasonable price. The paper itself is acid free and has many beneficial archival features along with long fibers which will help the document stay together for the long term (centuries if kept in an appropriate environment). It is reasonable in price as well for its use. Genuine animal parchment is the best solution for longevity however I really don’t know if inkjet ink would take to it as well and at $35 for a single sheet, I want to try to find another solution.

-Inks for your printing. Luckily, there are many inks available today that are high quality and suitable for the purposes of archiving. The important criteria is having a pigmented ink rather that a die based ink. Dies degrade pretty fast as they are organically based and water soluble. Pigments on the other hand are not water soluble and are inorganic leading to a longer lifespan. As far as I am aware, most if not all high end photo quality inkjet ink are pigment based and offer acid-free and archival quality prints. I found the Epson printer I use has some DuraBright Ultra Pigment ink that fit the bill and most likely your preferred printer brand has some as well.

-Digital Media. For digital media, this is another interesting search I took upon myself and here is what I found. Again, this is the best and most cost effective solution I found but maybe not the only one. If anyone has any other suggestions, I’m all ears. The solution I found is the M-Disk. It is advertised as a Write Once Disk (really important) that uses inorganic material as the digital medium and can last an estimated average of 1000 years under proper environmental conditions as tested by the US Navy. The 95% life expectancy of disks is around 500 years. More than enough for my purposes though. It was first created at Bringham Young University as I understand for the purposes I would think of creating extremely long lived digital archives as they would want to keep ancestry data. The M-Disk requires a DVD or Bluray drive that is specifically designated for it and as I found the one that I purchased for my computer years ago is compatible already. These drives are very inexpensive though and you can find a suitable drive for under $30. The M-disk is the expensive item in this case. Verbatim has various archival disks available and as I understand it the 100GB M-disk Blurays are the ones that did the best in their longevity testing.

With all of these solutions, the idea would be to create your own archives and folders on your computer and as you reach the size of your disk, burn it or print it as needed to create an Archival digital copy or physical copy of your own.
God’s speed and if you have any questions or comments let me know. I just had 3 days of “vacation” and returning to work tomorrow but I’ll try to respond as I can.