Talk:3052: Archive Request

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)