The storage building housing boxes of company records is now leveled. The boxes moved into the garage are being scanned, it's amazing how many files get generated. One such file was some mineral retracement surveys. This was not from the company but from a different group. Both surveyors are passed away that owned the other company but we got some of their records.?ÿ
Time to let go of this stuff. The reason we started doing this was to create some room. The files had over taken our space. I spent 30 minutes going through some old files from 1979-81, the amount of junk in them filled a large garbage bag. I only kept section line data the rest went to recycle. I think we are seeing the end of this scanning,,,,,,,,,finally.?ÿ
Mr. Hawking stated 'once infornation?ÿ is created, it cannot be destroyed'. Apparently he did not know any surveyors (or Bill Gates)...
It makes me a little nervous when I hear about scanning and tossing original paper files. Nothing will ever surpass the quality of the original (no matter how far gone it is) but I also recognize the need for space. Unfortunately it takes someone with actual survey knowledge to do what you did in filling that garbage can and saving what actually mattered.?ÿAt a former place of employment in San Diego, going through the countless boxes of old records was a recurring topic of every weekly management meeting.?ÿ
My wife and I were discussing this relative to books. She and I have both found some of the older, sometimes out-of-print titles are getting more and more difficult to find and digital copies are full of errors. This is made even more apparent when the book had to be translated. One Japanese author I read is so difficult to find because many of his books were destroyed in WWII. His works were translated (kind of) after the war by English folk so it's a hit or miss thing. Not to mention lots of publishers will kick out cheap reprints that are simply wrong. One old title I got by this author was supposed to be about 350 pages... it was but it was pg 178 to 200-somthing over and over again.?ÿ
The moral of my rant is I appreciate what is tangible. Digital files are great but how many of us can easily access the photos we took in the early 2000s and stored on one of those old dc-powered external hard-drives? My hand is up, and I'll be hard-pressed to find the power cord to that thing. Another 10 years and I may as well consider those gone to the ages.
@drew-r Open that puppy up.?ÿ Typically they contain a standard hard-drive plugged into a board that provides power and converts from the hard-drive interface to USB, Firewire or whatever was in vogue at the time.?ÿ Adapters are still available that come with a power supply and will work with the old IDE drives or the more modern SATA drives.
I know of several cases where massive amounts of records were tossed away, destroyed. In the 1960's, the City of Pittsburgh was told that photogrammetry had made their old survey data useless (triangulation, traverse, planetable mapping). So they threw all of the old field books, etc away. Now all they have left of the control network is index cards with coordinates.?ÿ
The Inter-American Geodetic Survey (IAGS), which was part of the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA), worked with countries across South America to develop control networks and map their countries. My dream was to work for IAGS when I graduated in 1986, but they were disbanded shortly thereafter. In 2014 I was considering a project with the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) to work with Peru in developing a transformation from their existing triangulation/cadastre system on PSAD56 to ITRF. My plan was to get as much of the old data from IAGS as possible, recover some stations, survey them, and then try to compute some transformation parameters. After contacting several ex-IAGS personnel, it appears that when they disbanded they threw all of the info they had in san Antonio into dumpsters.?ÿ
You have to admire NGS for their work in entering all of the old triangulation data into computer readable form for the NAD83 project. And the leveling data for NAVD88. That is why I think it is a shame that they no longer consider the old conventional network of any value, at least not as far as adjusting it to new datum realizations. They did for a while, they would adjust the network in a state to the new HARN observations, but they stopped that for the 2007 adjustment, which was GPS only.?ÿ