3052: Archive Request

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Archive Request

Title text: They just want researchers in the enclosure to feel enriched and stimulated. ('The Enclosure' is what archivists call the shadowy world outside their archives in which so many people are trapped.)

Explanation

Research sometimes involves looking up old data in an archive, and old data is often not stored in a modern standard of file format. It may either be an older standard, largely forgotten and no longer catered for, or a choice of original archival format that made sense only within the organisation itself; either way, being a proprietary internal or licensed third-party format that lost (or never gained) wider support in the world at large. Unless the archive's contents are periodically re-examined, and up-converted into more contemporary standards in a timely manner, they might not be able to provide the data the researcher needs in a convenient way. The comic shows Cueball facing several issues that can happen with archived data:

• The data is stored as paper records, which will have to be scanned into a digital format.
• The data is being sent as a CD-ROM instead of being emailed or shared online, so it will take time to arrive. Also, most computers sold today do not come with a CD or DVD drive so the researcher might need to use another computer, or buy an external CD drive, to read it.
• It will take 10 business days (about 2 weeks) to process the request, plus shipping time.
• The data is not being sent in a common format for scanned documents, such as PDF, but a proprietary format that needs special software to decode.
• The decoder software only runs on Windows 98 or Windows XP, versions of Windows which are no longer supported by Microsoft, requiring a very old computer or the installation of a virtual machine. This often happens when old software is no longer supported by the manufacturer, so it cannot be updated to work on newer versions of Windows. This will add to the difficulty for the researcher to decode the data when they get it.

Normally, the reason for data coming in deprecated formats would be that it is held within a legacy system that was built around those formats. However, since these records are having to be scanned from paper in the first place, the rest seems to simply be inserting extra complication unnecessarily. The records could simply be scanned and shared using current systems and formats. This is borne out by the caption and the title text.

In zoos, captive animals need behavioral enrichment to promote physiological and psychological well-being - to keep them active and reduce stress and harmful behaviors. One common method is to provide food or treats encased in such a way that the animal has to exert effort to open/destroy the enclosure. The intention is to mimic the natural pattern of having to work to get to food, with the challenge and effort providing fulfillment and distraction, in addition to receiving food. The comic humorously suggests that archivists are doing the same thing as zookeepers - providing intellectual stimulation for the researcher by forcing them to jump through hoops in order to get their data. The title text suggests that archivists live in their world of archives and see the rest of the universe outside it as a cage that's trapping the rest of us. This is perhaps a reference to Plato's Cave, a philosophical question about what it means to perceive reality for which Randall has enjoyed poking fun at the idea before, or any number of examples of 'inside-out' thinking, such as Wonko the Sane (from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) or Jevil (of Deltarune), where someone insists that they live 'outside' a conceptually inverted structure which contains the whole rest of existence beyond ('within') its walls.

In libraries and archives, catalog enrichment means adding useful data to the catalog, including scans of the table of contents or the whole book. Many institutions have already digitized large parts of their collection. Researchers can then download a scan directly from the online catalog, just by clicking on a link.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete: Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[A side view of Cueball, sitting on a wheeled office chair, at a desk with a laptop on it and his hands on the laptop. A jagged line comes from the laptop screen presumably representing text on the computer screen from an online page, with the underlined text representing a hyperlink to another online page.]

Computer: To request data from the archives, fill out this form. The pages will be scanned, encoded to CD-ROM, and mailed to you within 10 business days.

Computer: Download the decoder for our proprietary format here (Requires Windows 98® or XP®)

Cueball: Ugh, fine...

[Caption below the panel:]

Archivists actually have everything in digital repos now, but they still do this to provide enrichment for researchers, the way zoos hide food for animals in hard-to-open boxes.

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Discussion

The "everyone else is trapped outside" is reminiscent of so long and thanks for all the fish (i think that's the right book), with the house with the inverted walls. The person living inside the house sees everyone else as trapped within the house.guess who (if you desire conversing | what i have done) 07:34, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

I was thinking of Deltarune, where Jevil thinks everyone is locked up EXCEPT for him. 162.158.137.211 17:06, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

I'm sure I'm not the only person to still have a handy XP machine, as well as a '98 one (SE is ok, I assume?) that I could boot up. As well as a 2K one that's already actually running, as I type, plus I could get my original '95 running again (might need new CMOS battery), with possibly some usable Win 3.1/3.11 installation floppies. - I'm a bit less capable of running Vista (urgh!), but I know exactly where I can borrow such a laptop (still in use). I'd be all out of luck with 8/8.1 and 10, as throughout those eras I skipped them and still stuck with the better designed XP, until the very latest (Win11) machine was forced upon me (meh...), with all its various foibles. (Although I may be able to cover most of the bases via various linux boxen, no doubt, with the right WINE/equivalent setups.) 172.70.85.116 08:54, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

"...with possibly some usable Win 3.1/3.11 installation floppies." Installation images for most Windows can be found on Archive.org. Unlock codes, if any (not for Win3), and if not in the archive description, can also be found in Bingle etc Search. PRR (talk) 23:32, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

"However, since these records are having to be scanned from paper in the first place, the rest seems to simply be inserting extra complication unnecessarily." These things actually happen, though, because not only the technical standard of the documents might be dated, but also the SOPs the people at the archives still have to follow - or even the actual persons who work there. Here in Germany, people were pretty baffled when it became known, during the COVID pandemic, that local public health offices still sent their epidemiological data to the federal agency in Berlin BY FAX. Health officials, however, were not ready to change this practice and cited a whole bunch of reasons why this was supposedly the better option. --172.70.230.237 10:15, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

It also caused a fuss (mostly with people who were looking for a fuss to cause, of course) that the NHS (the UK's health service) was still using fax communications, amid promises that they were to be phased out. Can't quite remember if this was before or after (though probably before) the first massive incident where NHS computers (which the original faxes weren't reliant upon) suffered disruption.

And, since then, there have been both ransomware problems and the whole Crowdstrike issue happening, when the ability to sign certain authorisation forms and fax it was probably (if still available as an option) very useful in leiu of the (technically more robust and secure... usually) electronically-signed successor process.

Though I've never worked directly in the health sector (I was in a sort-of-aligned area, dealing with the validation and authorisation of products from the pharmaceutical quarter), my experience with systems validation and change-control really wants there to always be a reasonable reliable fallback/failback mechanism should things happen. There are a number of things it might be impossible to recover from (the effects of widespread war or natural disaster), and some that will be difficult (localised problems requiring moving to a brand new building, with enough people/material/resources to keep going whilst any irretrievable loss is worked around), but keeping open a backup channel of moving information around (slips of paper, within a building, maybe faxes can do a better job than couriers for longer journeys and/or more immediate response) would be very useful.

Of course, only using the fax system is problematic, given the extra functionality and (when done correctly!) security of a computerised system, but SOPs/P&Ps need to be properly reviewed (and enough thought put into them that even the stick-in-the-muds can't complain about "if it aint broke, don't fix it" — an attitude I wholly sympathise with, as I've seen many, many things being "fixed" or "improved" into an unworkable state, usually dumping the problem on someone other than the one who tried to modernise whatever it was).

For the comic, disregarding the title text's clear intentional nod to nostalgic and archaic mechanisms, it looks quite like a rarely accessed historic archive whose maintainers (those who know where to look in the extensive and dusty back-catalogue) haven't really been kept in the loop or been able to justify any decent departmentsl budget beyond that needed to keep everything safe in its original form. At best, the new guy (only been there a decade, still "the new guy", if he's not been moved elsewhere/onwards, as a reward) had realised that migration to Vista is causing a problem, so made a specific note of it on the 'new' web front-end to the LotusNotes-based request and support system. (Ironically, probably the most future-resiliant part of the whole corporate intranet, give or take the possible browser complaint about being unable to connect as https with a current certificate.)

But I'm sure there's also different interpretations from those I most directly relate to. 172.71.178.97 11:55, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

Firing up my suspicious node. (c.f. Commander Vimes) Another possibility is that providing these obstacles is a way of eliminating trivial requests, thus reducing the archivists workload and preventing the researchers getting bloated on low quality information. 😉 RIIW - Ponder it (talk) 11:30, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

The extra complication could also be added to resemble the "good old times" when researchers had to do very complicated things (one example that immediately came to my mind: w:Constantin_von_Tischendorf#Discovery_of_the_Codex_Sinaiticus_Bible_manuscripts When you previously had to travel to a monastery in a desert you can only enter by being hauled in in a basket, then a CD-ROM and a proprietary format seems almost trivial to handle in comparison. --172.68.253.135 18:27, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

"...possibility is that providing these obstacles is a way of eliminating trivial requests, thus reducing the archivists workload..." I have been in the business of discouraging silly info requests. You put the obstacles BEFORE the copy phase. Demand the exact title and all metadata in Octal encoding before I lift a finger. Always get the fee in advance!!! Scrawling "Incomplete" on requests is a lot easier than going to the vault, threading the scroll/tape in a copier, finding a blank tape/disk, etc. PRR (talk) 23:38, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

This is randomly relevant to me(in multiple ways) as this week I have been trying to digitise a VHS tape of my appearance on a local game show from years ago. When we were eliminated it was by the points value of a single question, and the question I always felt hard done about was “Name a profession starting with A that digs into the past”. My answer of “Anthropologist” was not accepted, the “correct” answer being “archaeologist”, but “Archivist” would also have worked. 162.158.2.120 09:46, 19 February 2025 (UTC)
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