jonathan_parkhouse1

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<p>... and the flies will come back too</p><div></div>

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<p>Iron Age (1st century BC) gold stater</p><div></div>

<p>Thanks for the new forum. This sawfly might have been a 'Monday in Nature' were it not for the 'hand of man' - literally in this case</p><div></div>

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Town gate:<div></div>

<p>Whilst not disputing the longevity of microfilm, its utility is a different matter. My career for the last 40+ years has been in archaeology. Archaeologists create vast archives of data, often far more than it is possible or desirable to publish in conventional print format. Access even to published data can be difficult.<br> Over the years there have been several approaches to solving this problem.At one point there was enthusiasm for publishing ancillary material such as appendices and specialist reports as microfiche. Consequently I now have a number of volumes of printed material with fiche appendices in a pocket glued into the rear cover. Each A4 sheet of the original document is reduced to an image approximately 8mm x 12mm. I do not have a fiche reader at home (and my recollection of the one we had in the office at my last place of work is of a fairly bulky piece of kit). It is completely impossible to read the microfiche text with a 'simple magnifying glass'. I can just about read it using a digital microscope, but the process is so cumbersome as to make it a thankless task; thus this content is to all intents and purposes near-inaccessible.<br> The next big thing was to put material on to CD. This allowed for a much wider variety of material to be cheaply disseminated than had been the case with microfiche (including, for example, colour photographs, tables and datasets). But as hardware and operating systems have been updated the CD content is increasingly hard to access - neither of the last two computers I have bought has had an integral CD drive and even though I have an external drive some of the content from CDs only a few years old is not recognised on my computers.<br> Enter digital archiving via the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) (http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk), (other professional disciplines are covered by other sector-specific service providers); here digital material is curated in perpetuity, being migrated when necessary to new platforms. ADS have developed a range of good practice guidelines, and it is often a condition of grant from funding agencies that resulting data is archived via ADS.<br> ADS has been in existence now for roughly 20 years and is well supported. I am sure that digital archiving through similar agencies is the way to go, and no doubt libraries will already be some way along this road. I don't see a future for microfilm in the long term.</p>

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63 newly-hatched Pholcus Phalangiodes spiderlings (=496 legs)<div></div>

<p>Musk Beetle</p><div></div>