Cataloging Yesterday and Today:
Where am I going with this? Well, other than the obvious kitsch value, think about how these cassettes might have been cataloged. You would assume the cataloger would have recorded that the audio recording spanned 21 cassette tape sides as well as other medium specific metadata. This got me thinking about surrogates, now that I have this recording as an .mp3, how important is it that information? Do I really need to know that the recording spans 21 cassette sides?

How much is too much information?:
I have the information that I need, Terry Goodkind’s original story. The fact that it was sliced up into 10 cassettes is not really relevant, as that was just a limitation of the medium at the time and does not effect the overall story.It might affect the quality of the digital transfer, but am I the listener really concerned with the quality (its pretty good considering its from a cassette) or is my real goal the actual content. I would vote on the side of content. Was the medium that I’m receiving it in important to the whole?

To Catalog the Details or Not?
How much time did that cataloger in 1994 spend recording this medium specific information, only to have it all kind of negated by the fact that it’s now an .mp3 making the cassette surrogates kinda irrelevant? Regardless of the cassette version, Richard still fights the good fight in his quest for Truth. So would I really be missing something by not knowing how many cassettes his journey was recorded on 16 years ago? I might just wonder why the recording sounds so analog, but other than that, what am I the end user getting from that information?

Readers ask yourselves, “How much time do you spend recording medium specific information about surrogates that might be irrelevant 10 years down the line?” Was it worth it? Flip to the other side of the coin and ask yourself, “What are the consequences of not recording this information?”

In order to really see something clearly you have to get rid of all the crud thats surrounding it. I (others included) call this simple method “getting rid of the R.O.T”.

Nothing is worse than finding the same digital asset in over a zillion places in one system, it devalues the original and is a headache to seek out and destroy all existing versions. For the next point, nothing makes information more irrelevant that when it is outdated. Outdated information can not be leveraged nor can you receive any ROI on it being available, the best thing to do is just get rid of it! Trivial content is just that, it’s trivial and unnecessary. For example if you have a system that can generate a particular file type on demand, let’s say it’s one that can generate a JPG from any type of supplied file be it a TIFF or a PSD or whatever you throw at it. Is it necessary to then also keep copies of JPGs versions of everything in your system as a “just in case”? Nope, no way! Get rid of it.

So, for every asset that makes its way across you desk you need to ask yourself, “is this R.O.T?” You will find that if you start approaching all your projects with “getting rid of the ROT” in your mind, you will start to clear away the cobwebs weighing down your system and overall make it more usable (and your life a bit easier) in the end.

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